Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration

by Keith Sawyer

Overview

"A fascinating account of human experience at its best." -- Mihá Csízentmihái, author of Flow

Creativity has long been thought to be an individual gift, best pursued alone; schools, organizations, and whole industries are built on this idea. But what if the most common beliefs about how creativity works are wrong? Group Genius tears down some of the most popular myths about creativity, revealing that creativity is always collaborative -- even when you're alone. Sharing the results of his own acclaimed research on jazz groups, theater ensembles, and conversation analysis, Keith Sawyer shows us how to be more creative in collaborative group settings, how to change organizational dynamics for the better, and how to tap into our own reserves of creativity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465093588
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	05/16/2017
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	377,062
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Dr. Keith Sawyer is the Morgan Distinguished Professor in Educational Innovations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The author of fourteen books, including the most widely used college textbook on creativity research, and over eighty scientific articles, Sawyer lives in North Carolina.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Beyond the Lone Genius ix

Part 1 The Collaborative Team

1 The Power of Collaboration 3

2 Improvising Innovation 25

3 Group Flow 45

4 From Groupthink to Group Genius 69

Part 2 The Collaborative Mind

5 Small Sparks 91

6 Collaboration over Time 117

7 Conversation and the Mind 149

Part 3 The Collaborative Organization

8 Organizing for Improvisation 177

9 The Collaborative Web 207

10 Collaborating with Customers 235

11 Creating the Collaborative Economy 255

12 Collaborating with Everybody 263

Acknowledgments 277

Notes 281

Index 323

Editorial Reviews

Forget about "the myth of the solitary genius": collaborative effort generates ideas and inventions, says this useful, upbeat book about how "innovation always emerges from a series of sparks-never a single flash of insight." Judiciously wielding exercises and dozens of examples, Sawyer (Explaining Creativity) helps the reader understand how people think and function in and out of groups. He looks at how J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis composed their epic novels in concert, how unorganized individuals can come together to provide disaster relief more efficiently than government planners, how Charles Darwin and Samuel Morse built their work on others' discoveries, how information sharing helped Silicon Valley beat out Boston's computer startups. (Sawyer's riffs on jazz ensembles and improv comedy as sites of ingenuity are less convincing.) Basing much of his work on that of mentor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi-who writes about reaching the state of heightened consciousness he calls "flow"-Sawyer offers guidelines for creating "group flow." Insisting that "collaborative webs are more important than creative people," he calls for an "organizational culture that fosters equivocality, improvised innovation, and constant conversation-that's a recipe for group genius." Even if few readers are in a position to do away with their organizational chart, this is a solid recipe for "unexpected innovation." (June)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Publishers Weekly

"Sawyer ... shares the secrets [of creativity] in a book that's every bit as fun, insightful, and practical as you'd want a book on creativity to be."—Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick

"In this provocative book, Sawyer complexifies our thinking about creativity, innovation, and genius."—Howard Gardner, author of Five Minds for the Future

"Group Genius is a must-read for anyone who ... want[s] to make the most of [their] own creative capabilities."—Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class

From the Publisher