Sparking That Lightbulb Moment: 4 Ways To Create More Creative Teams

While technology skills—and writing good AI prompts—may seem like all-important competencies for career success and sustainability today, creativity may be even more important in our fast-changing business environment. This is true not only for your company’s design team and communications department. As this article in Harvard Business Review puts it, creativity sparks innovation, boosts productivity, allows for adaptation, and fosters growth.

Also, creativity is fun—especially when a group does it together and gets into a creative flow, says University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill psychologist Keith Sawyer. Flow, a term coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is that feeling of being fully engaged, excited, “in the zone,” as an article in PositivePsychology.com put it. Group flow is when that great feeling happens with others.

Sawyer is a leading scientific expert on creativity and the author of 20 books, including Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration and Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity. He came to creativity studies in a …well . . . creative way. While working on his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, he began moonlighting as a pianist in jazz improvisational ensembles. He then joined one of the city’s legendary improv theater groups. He found himself intrigued by the psychology of the group improv dynamic and music and theater, and quickly began exploring how it could be applied to business teams.

“I realized that if you could bottle that improvisational energy, your team could come up with breakthrough ideas,” he says. “I’d seen teams in the consulting world, where I worked before going to grad school. Some were rigid and did not generate new ideas. Others were more fluid and less possessive, and more creative. Those teams were basically improvising.”

You can bring improv energy—and the sometimes wild creativity it generates—to work,whether you’re an individual contributor or a leader. Here are 4 ways to get started:

Aim for the small contribution

To get group flow at work you want to operate like a late-night improv team. Not by drinking beer and joking around on stage but rather by aiming for the small contribution that others can build on. Rather than trying to think of the one, resounding, “ah-ha!” insight that everyone will talk about for years, focus on adding a little idea to the mix.

“I call it ‘moving it forward.’ Each person takes what came before and adds to it,” says Sawyer.

“When this is working well, the sum is bigger than the parts. That’s what’s super exciting about groups. That’s where you get breakthrough creativity.”

Don’t let the bad idea be the enemy of the good

What if someone adds a terrible suggestion to the mix? It’s outside the company’s core offerings, against the brand, not remotely realistic, or not something anyone would ever use. What do you do with that bad idea? Let it generate a good one.

As a leader, resist the urge to jump in. Instead of saying, “Wow, that is really the worst suggestion all day,” wait and see if it ignites a surprising idea in someone else’s mind. Bad ideas can be especially valuable when your team or organization is stuck. “Everyone’s stumped. You bring the team together to come up with solutions. You really need unexpected, surprising things to happen that no one person could think of on their own. That bad idea might be the spark that leads to the good idea later,” says Sawyer.

Avoid rewarding individual effort

It’s natural to call out a great idea and offer praise for an individual’s stellar contribution, but you would never see this happen in an improv troupe, in part because focusing on one person’s idea stops the group flow. Highlighting an individual’s effort also can cause that person to feel “ownership” of it, which makes it very hard to let it go if something better comes along.

Just as individuals should strive to consider their contributions as building blocks for the whole, so should leaders foster that group-improv attitude—by not interrupting, with compliments or critique. This may sound counterintuitive, but the goal is to have someone else quickly jump in with another thought. Praise from the leader can interrupt the rhythm, and make it harder for others to say something stupid. Don’t think of yourself as the mediator of a group discussion or the director of a team. Rather, be the facilitator. “You’re not the theater director, standing in front of the stage, ordering everyone around,” says Sawyer. “Instead, step in when it’s not happening. If someone says something and no one responds, then you say, ‘Okay everyone, can you build on that?’ If you’ve done your job right, you won’t have to say anything,” says Sawyer. “Other people will already be moving it forward.”

A lot of companies have incentive systems that paradoxically squelch contribution, says Sawyer. “Rewarding that person turns out to be a horrible idea because successful new products come from lots and lots of people. If you incentivize people to come up with their own ideas, then you aren’t incentivizing them to work together and to fail.”

Foster collaboration as a culture

You can foster more of an improv spirit in your company. “If someone comes to you with a great idea, circulate it around the organization. The more it flows around, the more likely it is that more ideas will emerge collectively from the organization,” says Sawyer.

As a leader, you can put in place improv-promoting systems. “A lot of innovative companies are doing this, fostering this exchange,” says Sawyer. “W. L. Gore, known for Gore-Tex waterproof fabric, is a big manufacturing company with lots of patents and products—dental floss, the best-selling guitar strings in the country, and mountain bike cables. They have incentive systems that incentivize coming together. They don’t have individual profit-sharing, which kills collaboration because people want to take credit for the idea. Everyone keeps ownership of their own ideas and doesn’t share. And then they stick with their own ideas that aren’t that great. Nobody comes up with a successful product all by themselves. You’ve got to get people to come together.”

Practice

While improv theater is based on “off-the-cuff,” immediate reactions, the skill to think quickly with a team takes practice. “Improvisational groups rehearse all the time,” says Sawyer. “People used to joke about this when I’d go off to my improv rehearsal. They’d be like, ‘Why do you need to rehearse? It’s improv.’ But improv is a muscle, just like anything else. It’s a skill set. You have to work on it like anything else. As a team member and as a leader, you want to practice.”

As a leader, you can promote practicing. “The most innovative organizations do have systems in place where people are creative every week. Gore has a policy where every employee spends four hours a week not doing anything except something potentially radical, new, and different that the company could potentially do with its resources, and that could make money at some point. It could be their own idea. They could join someone else and work on their idea. These teams kind-of form spontaneously, but the manager doesn’t have to give approval. You’re just doing whatever seems like it might be useful. It’s like sacred; you can’t overwork somebody so they end up using their four hours on the project. If you fail, you don’t get dinged.”

The guitar strings that W.L. Gore manufactures, called Elixir Strings and famous among musicians for their patented fluoropolymer coating, came about this way, says Sawyer. “Most of the time, nothing great happens. But every once in a while, something breakthrough comes out.”