The 7 Key Traits of Creative Teams.

1. Innovation emerges over time

Frequently when looking from the outside collaboration can’t be seen, it is an invisible collection of small, yet vital ideas that lead to the final innovation.  Each person creates a small part of the final idea, with their team taking this idea in a way that, individually a person may not have thought to take it.  This collaboration may not been visible without scientific analysis.  When the right ideas are combined in the right structure, collaboration can bring together successful innovation.

2. Successful Creative Teams Practice Deep Listening

It is important to collaborative creativity that you are able to listen and respond, not just think up your own ideas.  It is important that your creative minds work together, not just listen, then plough on with your own ideas.

3. Team Members Build on Their Collaborators’ Ideas

When Teams use deep listening their ideas are constantly being developed and taken further.  No person could have a great idea without being influenced by those around them, without being able to bounce your ideas of someone, there is no real opportunity for them to develop substantially.  The hard work of one person is no match for the hard work of many.

4. Only Afterwards Does The Meaning Of Each Idea Become Clear

No one person is solely responsible for an idea, because no idea can reach its full potential until its been interpreted by others.  An idea can’t take on meaning until its woven together with another, or built up by your creative peers.  When working within a creative team you must be willing to accept other people’s interpretation and development of your ideas or your idea will remain meaningless. 

5. Surprising Questions Emerge

The most creative results occur when a team either looks at an existing problem in a new way or finds a new question that needs solving.  This causes ideas to be transformed into questions and problems.  Creative research has proved that creative groups are more effective at finding new problems than solving old ones.

6. Innovation is Efficient

Improvised innovation is a good example of how innovation can be efficient.  It will allow you to come up with a vast number of ideas, often with more useless ideas than good ones.  But the good ideas can often turn out to be something really special, which will make up for or the failed ideas.  However, its not just the two extremes some are mediocre and will merely take some work to be developed into a really innovative ideas.  And at the end of the process when the bad ideas are discarded we are just left the innovation and none of the failure.

7. Innovation Emerges From The Bottom Up

Most creative teams are highly self sufficient, needing no guidance they can react to changes around them and also form of their own accord, creative people naturally joining together and producing a team.  The team transforms an individuals stroke of imagination into group innovation.  This is not a system that is preferred by most management teams as it creates an uncontrolled outcome, and is riskier and less efficient.  However, when successful the creative result is far greater than anything that could have been thought up by an individual.

(Group Genius, Keith Sawyer, Pages 14- 17)