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Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (Your Coach in a Box) | 
 enlarge | Author: Keith Sawyer
Creator: Jonathan Marosz
Publisher: Your Coach Digital
Category: Book
List Price: $29.98
Buy New: $17.49
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Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 993940
Format: Audiobook, Unabridged
Media: Audio CD
Edition: Unabridged
Number Of Items: 7
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 5.9 x 5.3 x 1.3
ISBN: 1596591722
Dewey Decimal Number: 158
EAN: 9781596591721
ASIN: 1596591722
Publication Date: August 5, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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?
In this authoritative and fascinating new audiobook, Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at WashingtonUniversity, tears down some of the most popular myths about creativity and erects new principles in their place. He reveals that creativity is always collaborative--even when you're alone. (That "eureka" moment in the bathtub couldn't have come to Archimedes if he hadn't spent so many hours arguing and comparing notes with his fellow mathematicians and philosophers.)
Sawyer draws on compelling stories of inventions and innovations: the inventors of the ATM, the mountain bike, and open source operating systems, among others, to demonstrate the freewheeling ways of true innovation. He shares the results of his own acclaimed research on jazz groups, theater ensembles, and conversation analysis, to show 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 Myth Busting... November 19, 2008
`Group Genius' is a myth busting work articulating the results of many studies into how the creative process works. It demonstrates the difference between how we perceive it working and how it actually works.
In short:
While we perceive that we have sudden moments of insight, the `eureka!' moment, in reality these moments are really achieved through lots of tiny steps usually strongly influenced by input from other people. This process is not an `assertion' it is the result of many objective studies which are detailed in the book. The really interesting aspect of this is that the people that experienced the creative `eureka!' moment almost always perceived the experience differently to what actually took place.
What I learned:
1.That we cannot trust our subjective experiences to necessarily accurately reflect reality, at least not without objectively testing them.
2.There is not so much mystery nowadays regarding "Insight" or "Hunches" or "Instincts" and they are certainly not supernatural. They are understandable in practical ways.
3.If you study the latest developments and learnings in the field of neuroscience much of what used to be the realm of the `spiritual' and the `mystery of human existence' and `consciousness' is being understood in much the same way as we have learned why the sun comes up, why people get ill and why it rains.
The question:
Do you have the curiosity, drive and interest to learn about reality? Or like so many people nowadays do you prefer to sit inside of a protective shell of subjectivity and ignorance regarding the human experience?
The knowledge is there for those interested in learning.
 Getting more out of more people,other things being equal October 20, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Ever thought that the Wright Brothers invented the airplane? Or that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, James Watt invented the steam engine, John Logie Baird did likewise for television and Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin (all from Scotland, by the way, the land of genius)? Sir Isaac Newton invented the calculus. Right! C.S. Lewis wrote the Chronicles of Narnia entirely from the spark of genius from within? Well, after reading this book you will see that these various stories of geniuses inventing things single-handedly, while warding off the depredations of jealous and rival others, are all myths, perpetuated by the believers in the importance of the individual and the notion that creativity can reside only within the single person.
This book makes a strong case for the view that inventions are, more likely than not, the outcome of collaboration or at least the use by individuals of information provided by a web of informants, friends, rivals, students, writers and a further miscellany of people, who provide the wherewithal that the "inventor" can use at the right time and the right place.
This book fulfils three purposes. The first is that it provides a free flowing and exciting account of how we think about the process of creativity. We can understand that how people produce the ideas and actions that lead to great works of art, scientific breakthroughs and the technology that we have all become so dependent upon in everyday living , have progressed from attempts to understand the thought processes of the lone genius to the realisation that creativity stems from teams of co-workers and collaborative webs of participants. As someone whose early research was concerned with the associative processes underlying creativity within the individual and who later worked through an understanding of the dynamics of group interaction to see the potential of collaboration, I can vouch that this book provides a good primer of work in the area and it does so with flair and humour.
The second is that it gives, in Part 2, a set of puzzles and tasks that can be used by individuals, but more importantly groups and organizations, to experience the insight that alerts them to the possibility of creative collaboration and which can also enhance that creativity. It is a primer and also a training manual.
The third benefit of reading this book is that it provides a series of case studies of successful modern companies that have benefited society through creative collaboration and many organizations, large and small, can take courage from these stories and consider breaking out of their current structures and practices and try the new.
A central premise of the book is that creativity and problem solving are dependent upon the utilisation of knowledge, distributed most effectively across many people and not only resident within an individual. This has always been the premise upon which the idea that distributed knowledge should be superior to individual knowledge. The problem until recently has been that the barriers to the sharing of knowledge have been difficult to overcome and groups of people share more than knowledge; they share inhibitions and past experiences which prevent the utilisation of knowledge that comes from other people. This book, like several others that have been recently published, is based upon the notion that with the internet and the development of network theory, the sharing and utilisation of knowledge have become more democratic and practical.
Sawyer looks at the literature on group problem solving and creativity in this light, and looks at what is emerging in work on webs of collaboration and networks of associations. There are many thoughts on how the utilisation of networks can facilitate thinking and problem solving and chapters 8 and 9 repay close attention and are rewarding.
As a social psychologist, however,one can take a more critical position. While Sawyer does acknowledge that there are lots of conditions that will produce quite the opposite state of affairs, he does not give this material much room. Individuals in many settings are far superior to groups in the quality of thinking that they produce. One can add countless examples of studies where it can be demonstrated that, in fact, groups are "dangerous to your mental health". Sawyer's book is one of several which have appeared recently with the same message. It is, however, more accessible than James Surowiecki's "The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few", and more balanced in its presentation of contrary evidence than Howe's "Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business". It is as optimistic as Sunstein's "Infotopia: How many minds produce knowledge" and one should not perhaps "rain on the parade" too liberally. But it would be foolish to take the contents of this book and apply the nostrums will-nilly to the all the tasks all organizations have to face. Like most insights which are used to generate formulae for practice, in this book, as in many others written today,one has to add "it depends" as a limiting statement after most observations and inferences.
Sawyer does add another important ingredient which does differentiate the book from these others,however, a set of core ideas concerned with the creative process that can be simply stated here and which can give a foretaste for the book. The first set of concepts stems from the idea of "flow", the notion that, when we are engaged in a task which entirely occupies our talents and we are concentrating on achieving our goal, we can attain a new state of consciousness where past, present and future seem to merge into one and we are almost outside of the environment. Sawyer applies this idea of individual consciousness to the experience we can attain within a successful operating group.
"Flow" in a group can be created when there at least five conditions in existence simultaneously. The group must have a clear goal, in the case of the dynamic tertiary education organization, a goal of solving specific problems within that environment. The group members must engage with each other completely, that is they demonstrate "close listening" where members are totally open to the ideas and suggestions of others, with no preconceptions. They are also concentrating only on the task, excluding intruding and distracting tasks and messages. They are given autonomy to address the task and have accepted that responsibility, and they subsume their own egos to the group, so that no one individual has individual leadership responsibility. If these conditions can be achieved, then the group is in a state of readiness to address the problems innovatively and to achieve novel solutions of high quality.
Of course, the achievement of this state of group consciousness is not easy and cannot be guaranteed, even if many of the conditions are in place. The group members need themselves to be skilled and knowledgeable, able to contribute and respond to others. But many people can report having experienced this state. Sawyer, while a psychologist, really formulated his ideas from his experience as a jazz musician, where collaboration and improvisation by the band members must predate the demonstration to the audience of a successful performance. If you are a musician or have played group sports, then you may well have experienced "flow" at some level, even if it has not been as an elite. The metaphor of music collaboration and sport makes an interesting comparison with the metaphor of the organisation as a military team prevalent today.
Setting aside any provisos, however, in the spirit of engaging creatively with an issue or problem, this book should be studied in the context in which it is written, to be seen as a creative solution to a pervasive issue in organisational behaviour. As a "Beginner's Guide" to the tribulations of group and organisational problem solving, this book on Group Genius, is certainly worth reading and studying. For an organization which has several teams, sometimes with goals and modes of operation which appear different, but which are, however, all seeking to achieve an overall goal within a particularly constrained market, this would be a good start to achieve a consensus that is, at the same time and perhaps somewhat paradoxically, creative.
Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce KnowledgeThe Wisdom of CrowdsCrowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business
Results May 31, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
After reading Keith Sawyer's interesting work for years, I added Group Genius as a required text in an Organization Design MBA class I teach. Students are evening students, middle managers to above. They represent all domains, IT, Finance, Engineering, Law, Accounting, Real Estate/Construction and other sciences as well. Following the addition of Group Genius, students began to turn in truly innovative work, creative and original, beyond anything I've seen in years of teaching. They recognized that this was no ordinary text but one they could apply instantly to their own group and team work. They wrote about using it immediately in the workplace, with extraordinary results. That's what I found too, in the classroom, among working people, extraordinary results.
Major Contribution-Nearest Billionaire, Endow a Center for This Guy! November 24, 2007
6 out of 9 found this review helpful
CHRISTMAS TIP: For the CEO who has too much money, too little time, myopic solicitous subordinates, and some anxiety about the future, this book, together with Howard Gardner's Five Minds for the Future comprise the perfect Christmas gift. Print copies of my review of each and insert those inside each book's cover before wrapping.
I have been interested in collective intelligence ever since Howard Rheingold and John Perry Barlow kicked my secret intelligence colleagues in the head back in 1992, when I first started to reform the secret world by introducing them to Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). Today, OSINT is converging with Collective Intelligence, Peace Intelligence, and Commercial Intelligence, which is an order of magnitude superior to the standard Business Intelligence (internal data mining and dashboards) and Competitive Intelligence (narrow focus on competition, not on customers or externalities including Wild Cards).
This book, in my view is a Nobel-level contribution. If this author is not promoted to full Professor, he should move. This one book is a capstone book, a pioneering book, a summative work of extraordinary value to every leader, but especially for the asset managers, the hedge fund and pension fund managers, and the CEO's in the banking, communications, computing, education, entertainment, and publishing businesses, whose lunch is about to be eaten by Google unless they band together and force Google to the table.
The author is gifted at combining serious education with solid examples and inspiring suggestion. I actually got goose-bumps on pages 25-28 as he described the USS Palau entering a complicated harbor without rudders or electricity or gyro-compasses. The humans instantly created a group mind and devised a shared solution for what used to be a complex and time consuming process. The goose-bumps are returning, just visualizing this (I am retired naval officer, among other things).
The author begins with his appreciation for jazz and comedy improvisation to lay out a case against brainstorming per se, and in favor of innovation as a process that follows an extended conversation. He teaches us that creativity occurs in context, each individuals being sparked by others. He says that group genius can be nurtured and harvested, but not in the established ways. FUN is a required foundation.
His early work focused on interaction analysis, but I would hasten to add that this must be from the age of Kindergarten up. As Howard Bloom notes in Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, we will never solve the eternal conflicts until we are willing to intervene for a full generation--by the time kids are five they have a group bias, by the time they are 25 they are "locked in" to the cultural biases (e.g. Jews and Palestinians as monkeys or non-humans, BOTH sides have this culturally ingrained bias by t he age of 10).
Although there is not yet a satisfactory work on how our existing pyramidal organizations are incapable of reform or renaissance, Jean Francois Noubel, on the web at The Transitioner, will have a chapter in my next edited work, and I hope his book comes out soon--I share with my libertarian and moderate Republican colleagues the view that both Congress and the Executive have become dysfunctional, as have most of our major corporations such as Exxon, and the time is right for a massive non-violent upheaval across the board.
On this note see, for example:
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future - and What It Will Take to Win It Back
I am totally inspired by the author's discussion of how innovation cannot be planned (although planning helps), it must be nurtured and inspired, or more pointedly, ALLOWED TO HAPPEN. As the author of Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace documents so well, we beat the creativity out of our kids by the fifth grades, and most organizations consist of cattle, not free-running mustangs.
I am impressed that the author properly and without excess recognizes his mentor, Mahaly Csikzentmihali with the concept of flow, defined at the time as consisting of four elements:
01 Skills equal the challenge (too good is boring, not enough is frustrating)
02 Goal is clear
03 Feedback is frequent
04 Free to concentrate fully
The author has expanded this to ten conditions:
01 Goal is clear
02 Close listening by all
03 Complete concentration
04 In control
05 Blending egos
06 Equal participation
07 Familiarity
08 Communication
09 Moving it forward
10 Potential for failure
The third section focusing on companies and on organizing for innovation is a "must do" task for CEOs and it cannot be delegated. This is one book each boss has to read for themselves, and not on a train--in isolation, totally concentrating on the words and ideas.
"Bureacracy prevents innovation." This is so true. I gave up on the US Intelligence Community this year, after realizing that Buckminster Fuller had it right--instead of trying to help them as I have for fifteen years, I have to displace them with the Earth Intellligence Network.
In part because of the author's wisdom, I have real doubts about the IBM Cognos deal. Certainly IBM can afford to expand into that marketspace by buying Cognos, but the question on my mind is this: Cognos is in Quadrant I (Knowledge Management) while all the innovation in happening in Quadrants II (Social Networking), III (External Information), and IV (Organizational Intelligence). I am pretty certain that for $100 million I could I could acquire or integrate the 100 key companies and build the EarthGame/World Brain within 5 years. So the question begs to be asked by those who own big blocks of IBM stock: can we get Cognos for $4B and spend the other $1B on first to market, in partnership with CISCO AON, with a totally integrated offering that makes every person on the planet a collector, producer, and consumer of commercial intelligence?
This book is essential reading for acquisition, asset, and fund managers.
The author's advice for CEOs (there is NO SUBSTITUTE) for reading the book:
01 Keep many irons in the fire
02 Create a Department of Surprise
03 Build spaces for creative conversation
04 Allow time for ideas to emerge
05 Manage the risks of improvisation (including too many too much too fast)
06 Improvise on the edge of chaos
07 Manage knowledge for (toward) innovation
08 Build dense networks (with hubs)
09 Ditch the organizational charts
10 Measure the right things
I have a note in the fly-leaf: "This is one of the best thought-out, ably-presented, most useful (i.e. profitable) books it has ever been my pleasure to read." This is not over the top, given the number of books I have read, a quarter of which I have reviewed on Amazon, because I am focused on saving the planet with shared information and open, legal, ethical sense-making. From that perspective, along with "Five Minds," this book is the tip of the spear.
The section on collaboration web work:
01 Build on history
02 Combine many small sparks
03 Frequent interaction across boundaries
04 Multiple discovery is common
05 No one company can own web (Google hasn't realized this yet, for those who want to know more, find and buy "Google 2.0: The Calculating Predator" as offered online by Infonortics UK).
Creating a collaborative society:
01 Reduce copyright terms
02 Reward small sparks
03 Legalize modding (modifications)
04 Free the employees
05 Mandatory licensing (no icing of knowledge)
06 Pool patents
7. Encourage indcustry-wide standards
Coincident with receiving my latest batch of books, which jumped to the front of my 40-book "awaiting review" pile, I received from Babette Bensoussan in Australia, co-author of Strategic and Competitive Analysis: Methods and Techniques for Analyzing Business Competition the following Old and New Rules (adapted from Betsy Morris in Fortune Magazine, 7 August 2006) that every CEO should print out and memorize:
Old: Big dogs own the street
New: Agile is best; being big can bite
Old: Be #12 or #2 in your market
New: Find a niche, create something new
Old: Shareholders rule
New: The customer is king
Old: Be lean and mean
New: Look out, not in
Old: Rank employees, go with the A's
New: Hire passionate people
Old: Hire a charismatic CEO
New: Hire a courageous CEO
Old: Admire my might
New: Admire my soul
See my list on Collective and Commercial Intelligence for about 30 other recommendations. In relation to this specific book I recommend:
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
See also my many lists and my own books. On balance, although Amazon does not let us organize our reviews yet (I read in 85 topical areas), if you select me as an interesting person (sorry), and THEN use the lists, my reviews pop to the top.
I would love to get Keith Sawyer, Howard Gardner, Lawrence Lessig, and Cass Sunstein into a room together. If any of you can make that happen, let me know, I'll come at my own expense to moderate what could be the world's hottest new improvisational documentary.
Leveraging the Genius of the Group November 19, 2007
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
The path to becoming more innovative often requires debunking a number of myths or commonly held beliefs. For instance, the idea that a lone genius is often responsible for an invention or innovation. In fact, most innovations or inventions spring from the combination of the work of many people. Edison did not create the lightbulb alone, nor did Al Gore invent the internet by himself.
In his book, Group Genius, Keith Sawyer looks at the power of Group Genius, the impact of collaboration on creativity and innovation. Rather than rely on a single genius, we should be harnessing the power and knowledge of many people in our organizations. Through a number of interesting examples, Sawyer demonstrates how the power of collaboration increases the capability of the firm to generate more ideas and better ideas, and enhances the culture of innovation.
Sawyer starts off the book with a few characteristics of creative teams:
1. Innovation emerges over time
2. Successful collaborative teams practice deep listening
3. Team members build on their collaborators' ideas
4. The meaning of an idea becomes clear over time
5. Reframing the problem or solving a different problem
6. Recognizing that innovation is inefficient
7. Innovation emerges from the bottom up
Although he presents these ideas early on, they don't receive enough exposition throughout the book. These concepts alone, however, are enough to chew on for quite some time.
Sawyer divides the book into three sections, looking at how teams collaborate and how corporations collaborate. Yes, I know that's two sections. The third section is a little less defined and really looks at how we as individuals think and the mental models we use which provide frameworks which can limit our thinking and creativity.
In the first section, on team collaboration, Sawyer demonstrates the power of improvisation as a method to improve problem solving and innovation. His argument is that too many rules and too much planning tend to choke out creativity and innovative problem solving. He provides several examples where groups were faced with significant challenges and had to improvise solutions on the spot. While improvisation is often inefficient, it can lead to better ideas and better results in some cases. Sawyer also describes "flow" - a concept that originates from research by Csikszentmihalyi. Flow is a heightened state of consciousness that occurs when:
* People are working on tasks that match their skills
* There's a clear goal
* There's constant feedback as to progress and attainment of the goal
* The person is free to fully engage in the task
Research shows that "flow" is essential to creativity. Sawyer moves on to describe a number of conditions that need to exist for a team to achieve flow, using examples from sports teams to improv to major corporations.
In the second section, the Collaborative Mind, Sawyer looks at successful innovators and people who were highly creative and seeks to determine how they got that way, and how "regular" people like you and me can become more creative. In this section there are a number of exercises to help you start reframing problems and step away from your usual perspectives and context.
In the third section of the book, Sawyer looks at using the concepts of collaboration and group genius within an organization - how to organize for improved collaboration and innovation, how to build collaborative webs and how to collaborate with customers. In this section he offers some very useful ideas and approaches to use within any team or organization.
Group Genius is an excellent book, because it combines theory with practice and practical guidelines. Too often, books about innovation and creativity are written from a purely academic viewpoint, with a lot of research and theory described, but not much information on how to put the information into practice, or from a very tactical perspective, suggesting a few tips or techniques or offering up some simple exercises. Sawyer does a good job of demonstrating the thinking behind his suggestions, but also presenting a number of actions that a team or corporation can take to become more innovative by tapping the collaborative genius of a team or the company. He uses a lot of examples, from improv actors to large corporations, but always within context. The section on the Collaborative Mind is interesting but really more focused on the individual and his or her creative capability, while the sections on team and organizational collaboration are focused on how your teams, groups and business units can harness the power of collaboration to achieve more creativity, better problem solving and generate better ideas.
Some books about creativity are read once and filed on the shelf for occasional reference. Group Genius is a book that will be so dog-eared and so heavily used you may need more than one copy for your own use, and a number of copies for your co-workers as well. This is a book that can be used by an individual, a team or a business unit, with relevance for all of them. This book is my first introduction to Keith Sawyer's work, and I look forward to reading his other books after reading this one. I highly recommend it to anyone who is searching for ways to improve the collaboration, creativity or innovative capability of a team or company.
Reposted from an original review on the Innovate on Purpose Blog.
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