“If I was you,” said a colleague recently “now would be a very good time to involve customers, to get more people involved”.
No, I thought, right now that would be the worst thing we could do.
Collaboration can kill creativity.
Most people in your office have nothing or very little to do with your work, yet collaboration with them – all the time – has become conventional business wisdom.
It’s partly this that has led to us all being meetinged and emailed to death. The mantra of sharing your work and involving everyone in decisions naturally leads to inviting and copying people into things that add no value to them, or you.
If you’re looking to be brave and do something entirely new, involving more people at the wrong time could kill your idea.
Work at MIT found that collaboration—where a bunch of people put their heads together to try to come up with innovative solutions—generally “reduced creativity due to the tendency to incrementally modify known successful designs rather than explore radically different and potentially superior ones.”
Businesses love the idea of this kind of ‘brainstorming’ as it involves a lot of people, is visible, and is seen as a quick route to solving a problem. There’s precious little evidence though that it produces any results.
A meta-analytic review of over 800 teams indicated that individuals are more likely to generate a higher number of original ideas when they don’t interact with others.
As Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic writes ‘brainstorming actually harms creative performance, resulting in a collective performance loss that is the very opposite of synergy.’