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Colin Fisher: The lone genius is a myth
00:33:07
In this conversation with author Colin Fisher, we get into why teams are 6.3 times more likely than individuals to produce breakthrough work, why the sorting hat in Harry Potter is actually the series’ true villain, and why 84% of managers try to coach their way out of team problems when the real fix is structural. We also talk about the dangers of using competition to motivate creative teams, why the ideal team size hovers around 4.5 people, and what it would take to pull our increasingly individualistic world back toward something more collective — without tipping into the other extreme.
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- [00:00]
A
The best teams aren't just in their own heads trying to individually take others perspectives, they're making that explicit and that they're really trying to learn about one another in the moment and learn about why people think the way they do, why people behave the way they do. That's also really foundational to design thinking. The principle of how are we going to come up with new stuff? Well, we've got to learn more about how other people are using the things they're using and what needs are not getting met right now.
- [00:30]
B
In jazz, there's a concept called minimal structures, like a rhythmic framework, a harmonic pattern, or an implied order of solos. It's just enough to hold the band together, but plenty of space for autonomous creativity. It's a useful lens for thinking about how any team might work, and it comes directly from today's guest. Colin Fisher was a professional jazz trumpet player before he became one of the leading researchers on group dynamics, and he's now an Associate professor of organizations and innovation at University College London. He's got a PhD in Organizational Behavior from Harvard and his new book is the Collective Edge. In it, he makes the case that we systematically underestimate the role groups play in every breakthrough we celebrate.
- [01:18]
C
We love stories about lone geniuses Newton, Einstein, Miles Davis. But when you peel back almost any one of them, you'll find a group behind it. We just tend to forget that part because our brains are wired to remember heroes, not ensembles. If you ask everyone on a six person team how much credit they deserve for the group's output, one study found the total came to 235%. In this conversation, we get into why teams are 6.3 times more likely than individuals to produce breakthrough work, why the sorting hat in Harry Potter is actually the series true villain, and why 84% of managers try to coach their way out of team problems when the real fix is structural. We also talk about the dangers of using competition to motivate creative teams, why the ideal team size hovers around 4.5 people, and what it would take to pull our increasingly individualistic world back towards something more collective without tipping into the other extreme. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Wooler.
- [02:18]
B
And I'm Aaron Walter. If you're hearing this, you're not currently on our Premium subscriber feed. DesignBetter Premium subscribers enjoy weekly episodes. That's four episodes per month rather than just two. And all of them are ad free. Plus you'll get an invitation to our monthly AMAs with the smartest folks in design and tech. And if you subscribe at the annual level, you'll also get our Toolkit, a collection of our favorite design and productivity tools like Professional Plexity, Miro, Read AI and more. You'll hear a preview of this episode, but if you'd like to hear the full conversation, please consider becoming a Premium Subscriber@designbetterpodcast.com subscribe the podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program, so if you can't afford a subscription, just shoot us an email at Subscriptions. We'll help you out. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.
- [03:28]
A
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- [04:01]
B
And now back to the show. Colin Fisher, welcome to Design Better.
- [04:10]
A
Thanks so much for having me, Aaron.
- [04:11]
B
Yeah, we're excited to talk to you. You are an associate professor at University of College in London, an American in London right now, and you have a new book out entitled the Collective Edge that just came out in August. And it's super relevant to companies, a lot of the folks who are listening to the show, anyone working in teams, which is most every human being. And given the current global struggles between individualism, nationalism and collectivism, there are lessons here for all of us. How is this book relevant at this moment in time?
- [04:47]
A
I think the book, in a way, it came out at the perfect time. And that may be kind of an unfortunate thing because in doing the research for this book, I saw we're living in an age of unprecedented individualism that no matter what indicator you look at, people are more individualistic all over the world right now than any other time in human history. Stuff like looking at the size of households, it's looking at even how unique the names we give our children are. But it's also in stuff about how much we think we owe to each other and how committed we are to collaborating across these traditional divides. And I think, as you alluded to, we're seeing the results of some of that individualism all over the world in some not so productive ways.
- [05:40]
C
One of the core concepts in your book is that groups and not individuals are really the big engines of progress. And we all grew up with these kind of seminal examples. People Like Isaac Newton, Einstein, Marie Curie, Bach, Miles Davis. Aren't these the proof of the power of the lone genius? Or do you have an argument against that?
- [06:00]
A
Any of those people are terrific and I think they were all brilliant in their ways. But when you start to peel back the stories underneath their success, you almost always find a great group. But those groups tend to get erased by history because of the way our psychology works, that we experience the world as individuals. And because of that, we empathize more with stories that cast individuals at the center of them, where you have a hero or a villain right at the center there. And because we remember those stories better, research suggests we find them more meaningful. And when we think of our own lives as a hero's journey, we actually find our own lives more meaningful. But that means we remember these stories better with these individual heroes as protagonists. And that means we systematically tend to forget about what the contribution of groups are. And it gets even worse than that because people are also egocentric in the way they think about their own contributions to groups. So when we get these great scientists and inventors telling their own story, it's just human nature that we all over claim a little bit of the credit for our own success. And that there's one study that found if you ask everybody in a group what percent of the credit they deserve for the group's output, if you think, what's it going to be? If we added up everybody's estimate, we can all intuit that it's going to be more than 100%. But one study found it was 235% in a six person group. And it gets worse and worse the bigger the group is. So because of these kinds of factors and our focus on individual traits, individual, individual contributions, we tend to systematically underestimate how important groups are in these great scientific discoveries, in the great new businesses, in the important inventions that change our world.
- [08:06]
B
It's interesting. Ed Catmull, when we talk to him, he's the co founder of Pixar, he was watching Toy Story and they won an Oscar and they were celebrating and he was thinking about that film and wondering which part of that was him, which part of it could he point to and say, I did that. And then he reflected and said, you know, just that idea, asking that question is a divider, it's a separator. It breaks this group and the power that we have. Which I thought was a fascinating way to look at things. But when I think of groups and teams, I think that there's a double edged sword Here, they can be powerful, they can amplify our creativity and our achievements, or they can create conformity traps. How do we encourage healthy dissent and avoid groupthink?
- [08:55]
A
As you say, we need groups to solve so many problems today that kind of continuing on. And I love the Ed Catmull example. I use a lot of his book and his work when I teach, especially about creativity in teams, that he's got a great perspective on it. But it turns out that it's right that we need teams to solve these problems, because we're seeing now that in science and technology, the breakthrough discoveries, the breakthrough Inventions, teams are 6.3 times more likely to come up with these breakthroughs than individuals working alone. But as you say, there's also this kind of countervailing force that even though we need these kind of different perspectives and different knowledge and expertise to come together and kind of mix up, to come up with these breakthroughs, so often groups are pressuring us to kind of go along, to get along, to not speak up when we disagree with the rest of the group. And that's because our sort of hunter gatherer ancestors, that's when our brains evolved the way they did. And one of the worst things that can happen to you if you were a prehistoric human was. Was to be kicked out of the group, to be ostracized.
- [10:11]
B
Still the case.
- [10:12]
A
It's awesome. Still the case, yeah. There's evidence that this kind of social pain triggers the same pathways in our brain as physical pain. And so we're so afraid of that that people are afraid to rock the boat and speak up against what they perceive to be the consensus of everyone else. So to fight that, we have to be really, really purposeful, that it takes leaders who are committed to bringing out everyone's contribution, who don't criticize others when they say things that might disagree or rock the boat, that they're encouraging these dissenting views and praising people when they're speaking up. Because it does take overcoming that fear of ostracism to speak up in ways that might upset others or disagree with others. The foundational concept in that is what Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson calls psychological safety. And that's this climate that it's okay to take interpersonal risks. It's okay to ask a dumb question, to suggest something that others might disagree with, and that that safety part of it is the safety from being kicked out of the group. So, you know, that even if I disagree with you and we say, you know, feel really strongly that we should go two different directions we can voice that and we can talk about it, and neither of us are going to risk this kind of ostracism in that process. So everything you do that creates psychological safety is doing something that's encouraging this productive dissent that's kind of discouraging of the conformity pressure that comes from this fear that we're going to be kicked out.
- [11:54]
C
In some organizations, there is a sense of competition, not just externally, where you want your product or experience to be better than your competitors, but internally, where teams are working at odds with each other or they're in conflict. How can a design leader think about encouraging cultures that compete externally and maybe even in a healthy way internally? But really the emphasis is more on cooperation.
- [12:20]
A
It's a tough balance to strike. Competition is a great motivator. It's probably one of the best motivators that are out there, assuming we know how to do the task. And I think this is something that's special about design. Design really holds a special place for me because I've spent a lot of time studying designers. I did some of my earliest research with ideo, and a lot of what I know and what I've discovered about how people especially help one another in teams comes from working with designers. And one of the things that's unique here is it's almost always true. We don't know precisely how we're going to do this task, that we don't know what the outcome's going to be. That design is a creative pursuit where we're trying to find new solutions, things that we don't know already. And under those conditions, the kind of motivation we get from competition actually encourages us to travel on neural pathways that are familiar. So when we compete, we're like, oh, we've got to come up with the right way. And therefore, I'm going to rely on stuff that's worked for me in the past, and that's a subconscious process, so we don't even know we're doing it. So although you might think, oh, I'm getting people to work harder, and you'll see these outward signs, people are working harder, you may not be getting their most creative ideas. When you're using competition as your primary motivator, although a little bit internally can work, especially if we've got these routine, turning the crank kinds of tasks, it's a little bit dangerous to get your members of the same organization competing with one another when what you want from them is creativity. Now competing with the other guys, again, that can be okay. But if you turn up the heat too much. We get that same cognitive response usually when we think about trying to create more motivation and incentives for people to be more creative. We like to praise and reward people when they've achieved that goal. One of my mentors, Teresa Amabile, was the person who sort of discovered the relationship between intrinsic motivation, this kind of fundamental enjoyment and challenge of doing the work itself, and creativity. And that she found a lot of the time extrinsic motivation. Things that come from competition and rewards and bonuses and promotions, those things actually inhibit creativity. But now decades of research have shown the exception to that is when you reward people who have already been creative. So say, like when you did something creative, we're going to recognize that we're going to really show that that's what we value. And then people in the future are more motivated to stay creative. I cluster competition in with any of these other extrinsic motivators and that when they're used in the time we're supposed to be creative, they can be counterproductive. But when they're used kind of after the fact to say like, hey, look at you guys, you did great. We really want to lift this up and say what a great job you did, then that can actually be productive in the long run.
- [15:38]
B
You know, I find this really interesting because I've seen inside of companies different reward systems both that you just described. If you do this, you will get this reward versus now that you have done that, you have this reward. It's a surprise. And that surprise tends to have a longer lasting motivational impact. And yet there are certain teams where the culture is competition is baked in. Like a sales team, for example. Everything that they do is about competing against your peers. There's still collaboration that happens in those environments, but it is competitive. You know, some companies have something like president's club where you go on a fancy trip and you get some cash or something like that. You get recognized among your peers. Whereas like a creative team, I would never dream of operating in that way. It feels very different. In fact, there's the famous story of Steve Jobs at Apple. In the early days in the 80s, it was Lisa versus the McIntosh team. And he intentionally set them against one another, which seems totally counterproductive because he wanted to motivate these two autonomous teams to push forward at all costs. And it became kind of famously destructive. It was not a healthy thing for the company. How do you dissect that? Can we pull this apart a little bit more of when that competition is healthy and when it's not competition against
- [17:03]
A
your rivals, like having a friendly rivalry with somebody that can be quite productive. So the fact that in most sports, Duke and UNC are rivals in college basketball, they won championships in alternate years. And a colleague of mine, Gavin Kilduff, who's a professor at NYU and his colleagues did a study of whether that kind of rivalry actually was improving the performance of not just one, but both of these rivals. And he found certainly in sports that was the case, that having someone you saw as your rival over time increased the performance not just of one, but of both of them. Because there was kind of this race to the top. So those kind of things work as long as it stays that we're racing to the top. But if we think that once we crossed this Rubicon of saying, well, the way I'm going to get ahead of my rival is by tearing them down, now we've got a problem, and that that's where competition can turn ugly real fast, and that there's a really thin line there. A really famous case of this rivalry turning ugly was between British Airways and Virgin Atlantic, where there was this campaign of various dirty tricks within the two companies, where there were sort of minor acts of corporate sabot over a number of years. And that what started off as probably a productive rivalry turned very quickly. If you're a manager and you think, I want to use competition to motivate two teams, like you talked about with Steve Jobs and Apple, within my company, usually when you start that process, you'll see a little bit of a bump up in motivation, but because it's so toxic and that our brains are want to look at our competitors not just as something aspirational to try and work our way up to, but they start to say, oh, you know, that's the enemy, and I'm going to see them not as somebody I want the best for. I think they're in a way, almost less human than I might otherwise think of them as. That these things have a way of being very uncontrollable. And I think intergroup competition is something that we have struggled throughout human history to control. And once you kind of let the genie out of that bottle, you have to keep a very close eye on it. To the point that I'm very, very wary of managers saying, like, I'm going to set up that kind of system where I've got teams in the same organization who are competing against one another, because even if you get that little boost in the short run, the chances that you can't control it and it turns ugly in the long run are pretty, pretty high.
- [19:52]
C
In the introduction of your book you talk about the sorting hat as a metaphor. And for folks who haven't watched Harry Potter and I'm sure there are very few out there, but for those who haven't, the sorting hat is this sort of creature, a hat that sits on your head and decides which group you're going to. So you might be chosen to go to Gryffindor or Harry Potter's group or you might be chosen to go to Slytherin, sort of the villain group in the movie. And the hat which is sort of in the movie is almost neutral. You don't see it as either a real positive or negative, but it's actually in our society, sort of a villain. So maybe talk about why that's relevant.
- [20:27]
A
The sorting hat in Harry Potter it's taking 11 year olds and saying you are going into this bucket and no one ever escapes from the categories it puts them into. Everyone who goes into one of these houses and is stuck there. And then just like we were talking about in the Harry Potter story, these houses compete against each other constantly. You can see just generations of families who have divided themselves and see these us and them dynamics across these same lines to the point that spoilers for Harry Potter. But there's two wars in the book, one at the beginning and one at the end. And both of them are on the dividing lines that were drawn by this sorting hat. We're doing the same thing. I think the reason that people probably even the author didn't think twice about oh, this sorting hat is a bad thing is because it feels really familiar. It feels like what we do in our own world because we do, we have an inner sorting hat that's constantly trying to put ourselves and others into groups and that it uses that as the basis to say are you going to be somebody I can cooperate with or are you somebody I've got to compete with? And that that's so fundamental to how we view other people and other humans that we don't even think twice about it. But it's a really dangerous tendency and I'm hoping that this brings awareness to how important and potentially dangerous that tendency can be.
- [22:03]
C
There's another kind of hat to sort of continue the metaphor. I wonder might be helpful here. So I'm not sure if you heard of Edward de Bono's book Six Thinking Hats. It's something I've heard Jony I've recommend several times that he does with his team, but it's essentially a Way to wear these different hats as a member of a team. So you could wear the red hat and think more about emotion or the green hat and think more about creativity. So maybe there's a way to sort of like flip that and use it as a way to gain empathy for the other parts of your team or different ways of thinking.
- [22:33]
A
Taking the perspective of other people is a really important thing to try and do. And what that idea kind of gets at is that we do contain multitudes and that when we're sort of in a certain role in a certain situation, it's easy to only see from that one perspective. But that all these different ways of challenging the perspective that we come in the room with are usually productive things. I think wearing different hats and trying to take other people's perspective and do this psychological mental mind reading is one way to do that. I'd even recommend another way before that, which is if you want to know what other people are thinking and feeling, you should ask them by asking questions. That's kind of an even more powerful way of learning about other people and what they're thinking, what they want, how they might look at a problem differently than you. And so I think curiosity and question asking often trump our kind of internal sense of, okay, what are other people likely to be thinking and feeling? And the same is going on when you are confronted by behavior that you're confused by or maybe even offended by or think is bad to ask. Well, what led you to that conclusion? Tell me more about why you thought that the best teams aren't just in their own heads trying to individually take others perspectives. They're making that explicit and that they're really trying to learn about one another in the moment and learn about why people think the way they do, why people behave the way they do. And I mean, I think that's also really foundational to design thinking too. Right. The whole principle of how are we going to come up with new stuff? Well, we've got to learn more about how other people are using the things they're using and what they want and what needs are not getting met right now.
- [24:28]
B
Colin, there's one creative group, one type of creative group that is often referenced as like the right recipe for collaboration, that is jazz bands. You play trumpet, right?
- [24:41]
A
Yeah, yeah, I was a professional jazz trumpet player before I got into this whole business school professor thing. Yeah.
- [24:47]
B
So we had Kamasi Washington on the show a while back to explore this. Because there's something special about jazz. I think it is the balance of structure that here is what musicians would call the head. So here's the central melody or the chorus that holds things together, and then there's an opening, there's a key that you might be in, but there's a lot of space for a musician to explore there, which is very different than like rock or pop music where. Where we've got lyrics and here's the chorus, here's the bridge, et cetera. It's so structured. There's a little bit of space for a solo, but it's very limited. As a professional musician, as someone who has a lot of experience with jazz, what is it that's special about that collaborative process that we could take on board in companies and other collaborative endeavors?
- [25:39]
A
In a way, this is what got me into organizational behavior in the first place, which was trying to understand the conditions that people in all walks of life can improvise creatively, where we can come up with something that no one of us possibly could have thought of spontaneously. And I think all creativity starts with these little moments of spontaneity. And more and more they come out of collaboration and social interaction. So I think there's a lot we can learn from how jazz is organized. There's two sets of lessons that I think over the years, management scholars have advocated taking away from jazz. One isn't really about creativity at all, but it's about high reliability performance. When I meet other professional jazz musicians and, you know, as long as we're over kind of a certain threshold, even if we start playing spontaneously, we don't say anything to each other, I'm really, really confident we're not going to fall apart, that we're going to be able to communicate, we're going to stay together and that we'll get through even a song that no one of us had any idea what was going to emerge from beginning to end. And that reliability comes from what we often in organizational speak, call minimal structures. My co author, Frank Barrett, wrote a lot about the fact that we have structure that coordinates us. It keeps us together, keeps us in the same spot. And these are things like the rhythmic structure, the harmonic structure, this kind of like harmonic pattern that underlies the melody that we keep repeating in traditional jazz. One lesson is, well, how do we create these structures that coordinate us, but still give us this room for flexibility, for individuality, for these moments where creativity can emerge, or often just that we can adjust? And I think some of the organizations have learned the most from this are people like emergency room medical teams, their swat teams, their film crews, where they're Dealing with a lot of moving parts and changing things. So there's those lessons, but then the lessons about really being consistently creative. I think what we have in jazz are very flexible but clear roles, and those roles go along with our instruments. When I show up, I know what a bass player is going to do. I know what a drummer is going to do. And I can tell by the instruments everybody's holding what roles we're likely to take. I even know down to, you know, usually when we have array of horns on the bandstand, there's sort of an implied order where people kind of look to the trumpet first. The trumpet often solos before the saxophone, before the trombone. And you know, that, like, if we don't say anything or make eye contact, we already know that there's kind of this default that's there and how we're going to interact with one another. And then we have a ton of shared knowledge that professional musicians probably know about 50 to 100 songs in common, and each person knows probably a lot more than that. And that means that we can collaborate spontaneously and that we can bring kind of our own thing to these songs that we have studied deeply, even though we're not going to play exactly what we've played before. And that's where I think your kind of average business may not invest enough in giving people this common knowledge, this common shared grammar to. To take full advantage of improvising creatively. A lot of businesses try to do brainstorming. They may not find it as productive as a place like IDO does, where people have this shared understanding of what this is, how this is going to work, and that we can then use it, deploy it flexibly. We can actually be creative in it because we have all this shared background about what the endeavor is. Organizations tend to under invest in generalized knowledge, really talking about what the norms of interaction are going to be. At ideo, they slap them up on the walls everywhere. You can't move 2 inches without seeing somewhere where it's telling you what the norms of brainstorming are. Yet in other companies, there's almost no investment in making these things explicit and making sure that everybody knows them. Any organization that wants to have more improvisational creativity in it, that means you need to really be investing in your people having this kind of shared knowledge.
- [30:25]
C
Interesting you bring up the brainstorming, because that's kind of where I was thinking of taking the next question. And one of the folks I taught with for a long time, Bill Burnett, he would always tell the students a great brainstorm session is in a lot of ways like a great jazz improvising session, and it is based on practicing together and understanding each other, where people are coming from. And I'm curious if you have any tips for folks that are either in a new team or trying to build a practice around this. And one way we think about framing it is early brainstorm might not be about coming up with a great new innovative idea. It's more about surfacing the ideas that people have already talked about and maybe give people a chance to learn or debate those ideas. I'm curious if there's any other ways you advocate for approaching early brainstorming with teams.
- [31:11]
A
Brainstorming in teams is actually it's been this huge area of research because there was a big debate in the 1980s.
- [31:21]
B
If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@designbetterpodcast.com subscribe Once you do, you'll get access to every full length episode, all ad free monthly AMAs with inspiring people in design and tech and recordings of all our past AMAs. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. If you can't afford a subscription, just email us@subscriptionsecuriositydepartment.com and we'll help you out. Your support makes design better possible. Invest in yourself and the design community by subscribing@designbetterpodcast.com
- [32:03]
A
Foreign
- [32:07]
B
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- [34:57]
A
You're thirsty for the sun on your shoulders.
- [34:59]
B
That perfect hang on the patio sundress. Those sandals you can wear all day and all night. And you've had enough of shopping from your couch.
- [35:07]
A
Done.
- [35:07]
C
Hoping it looks anything like the picture when you tear open that envelope.
- [35:11]
A
It's time for a little in person spring treat.
- [35:13]
B
It's time for a trip to Ross.
- [35:15]
A
Work your magic.