g f g g rouP low and rouP enIus by Keith Sawyer Keith Sawyer views the spontaneous collaboration of group creativity and improvisation actions as group flow, which organizations can use to function at optimum levels. Sawyer establishes ideal conditions for group flow: group goals, close listening, complete concentration, being in control, blending egos, equal participation, knowing team mates, good communication, and being progress-oriented. Collaboration is an essential ingredient of group flow and is vital to the Montessori classroom. Basketball is religion in Indiana, and one of its mega churches is Bloomington, home of the Big-Ten Indiana University Hoosiers, where larger-than-life coach Bobby Knight won three national cham- pionships between 1971 and 2000. But the Indiana tradition isn’t just about famous coaches and national championships. In the legendary Old Fieldhouse on 7th Street, there are 16 indoor basketball courts in one cavernous space. The team doesn’t use these courts anymore. Now, the Old Fieldhouse is called the HPER student rec center and it’s one of the best places in the country for pickup basketball. No coaches, no referees, and no championship: The players cre- ate their own teams, police their own behavior, and work out rules for who gets to play and when. Pickup basketball brings together people who would probably never meet off the court, like at a Dr. R. Keith Sawyer, a professor of education at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, studies creativity, learning, and col- laboration. He received a computer science degree from MIT in 1982 and then began his career with a two-year stint designing videogames for Atari. In 1990, Sawyer began his doctoral studies in psychology, where he studied creativity with Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He has been a jazz pianist for over 30 years and spent several years playing piano with Chicago improv theater groups. Sawyer has published 14 books and over 80 scientific articles. His latest book is Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity. Reprinted with permission from chapter 3 of Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. New York: Basic Books. Copyright 2007 by Keith Sawyer. Sawyer • Group Flow and Group Genius 29 YMCA in Waukegan, Wisconsin, when two of the regular players were Alan, a young black player just out of high school, and Pip, a middle-aged white judge. It turned out that Alan was a member of a gang. The others didn’t know this until one of Alan’s fellow gang members came up for trial in Pip’s courtroom, and Alan was at the trial every day along with the rest of the gang. Pip said, “I looked up one day and he was in the courtroom and Christ! It scared the hell out of me because I had been playing ball with him for awhile and I gave this guy like twelve years.” But they continued to play together, along with Sam, a thirty-year-old black man who worked with at-risk youth and with the police. Games at this YMCA brought together lawyers, police officers, a liquor store owner, a minister, factory workers, a flight attendant, and ex-cons. The same thing happens every day and every week all over the country, from Lincoln Park, in Santa Monica, California, to the leg- endary West Fourth Street basketball court in New York’s Greenwich Village. Just like Bloomington and Waukegan, pickup ball brings together executives, professors, workers, and streetwise teenagers. n e ur G a ar S © ol o h c S ori s s e nt o M o m a g er B 30 The NAMTA Journal • Vol. 40, No. 3 • Summer 2015 Why do these amateurs spend so much time and effort on bas- ketball? There’s no money in it, no admiring fans. When you win a pickup game, it earns you the right to play in the next game—nothing more. Many of the middle-aged men and women who play pickup basketball have had repeated knee injuries; there’s a real physical cost to the game. They play because when you take away the referees, the clock, the rulebook, and the coaches, you’re left with the pure, improvised essence of basketball. Basketball is one of the most improvised and team-oriented of all sports, the sports equivalent of group genius. In pickup games, everything that slows down the professional game has been taken away—there are no free throws in streetball, for example. There’s nothing standing between the players and the deep feeling of peak experience that emerges when the team is in sync. Bill Russell, the famous center for the Boston Celtics, spoke frequently about this almost spiritual experience: Every so often a Celtic game would heat up so that it became more than a physical or even mental game, and would be magical. That feeling is difficult to describe, and I certainly never talked about it when I was playing. When it happened I could feel my play rise to a new level…. The game would just take off, and there’d be a natural ebb and flow that reminded you of how rhythmic and musical basketball is supposed to be….It was almost as if we were playing in slow motion. Teams can win only by improvising and collaborating, changing constantly in response to the adjustments their opponents are mak- ing. One pickup player told this story of improvised innovation: I was guarding Paul and sagging off him to help my team- mates play defense. Our opponents collectively realized that I was leaving Paul to double-team whoever had the ball, so our foes began passing the ball to Paul. He caught the ball and scored a couple of shots. I adjusted by stick- ing close to Paul, but by then his teammates had realized that he was “hot,” so they began to pick and pass. They set picks by getting in my way, freeing Paul. Then, they would pass him the ball and he would score again. My teammates grasped what Paul and his teammates were doing to me, so they began to help me guard Paul. Sawyer • Group Flow and Group Genius 31 What’s the magical chemistry that happens when a team impro- vises in response to every move by their opponents, without saying a word, and wins the game? The answer can’t be found in the skill or creativity of any one player; the entire group makes it happen. PeaK exPerIence I began to gain insight into this magical chemistry when I worked on my PhD at the University of Chicago with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the famed psychologist who coined the term “flow” to describe a particular state of heightened consciousness. He discovered that extremely creative people are at their peak when they experience “a unified flowing from one moment to the next, in which we feel in control of our actions, and in which there is little distinction between self and environment; between stimulus and response; or between past, present, and future.” Drawing on research with mountain climbers, club dancers, art- ists, and scientists, Csikszentmihalyi found that people are more likely to get into flow when their environment has four important characteristics. First and most important, they’re doing something where their skills match the challenge of the task. If the challenge is too great for their skills, they get frustrated; but if the task isn’t challenging enough, they simply get bored. Second, flow occurs when the goal is clear; and third, when there’s constant and im- mediate feedback about how close you are to achieving that goal. Fourth, flow occurs when you’re free to fully concentrate on the task. When you’re lucky enough to work with these four features, you often enter the flow state—where people from all professions describe feeling a sense of competence and control, a loss of self- consciousness, and they get so absorbed in the task that they lose track of time. Csikszentmihalyi has gathered years of data documenting that flow is the most essential ingredient in creativity. Creative people, in all professions and all walks of life, have their most significant insights while in a flow state. Even though most people say that they enjoy time at home more than they enjoy working, Csikszent- mihalyi’s studies show that people are more likely to be in flow at work than when they’re relaxing at home. Many other psychologists 32 The NAMTA Journal • Vol. 40, No. 3 • Summer 2015 have confirmed the link between flow and creativity, especially at work. For example, Teresa Amabile of Harvard University studied over 200 professionals at seven companies, and found that creative insights were associated with the flow state. Even the day after be- ing in a flow state, people were more creative. Flow researchers have spent a lot of time studying the individual creator, but people don’t play pickup ball because of individual flow—dribbling the basketball or honing their shots—after all, you could do those things by yourself. They play because they love the high that comes from group genius. In fact, Csikszentmihalyi found that the most common place people experienced flow was in conver- sation with others. At work, conversation with colleagues is one of the most flow-inducing activities; managers, in particular, are most likely to be in flow when they’re engaged in conversation. Conversation leads to flow, and flow leads to creativity. What happens, I wondered, when flow emerges in a group activity? Does the group itself enter a flow state? Might there be something like “group flow”? And what happens when everything comes together to help a group be in flow? The answers tell us how to foster group genius. the ten condItIons for grouP flow I began to explore these question by studying jazz ensembles. I was a jazz pianist through high school and college, and I’ve often sat in with professional groups. Basing my research on Csikszentmihalyi’s seminal work, I discovered that, sure enough, improvising groups attain a collective state of mind that I call group flow. Group flow is a peak experience, a group performing at its top level of ability. In a study of over 300 professionals at three different companies—a strategy consulting firm, a government agency, and a petrochemical company—Rob Cross and Andrew Parker discovered that the people who participated in group flow were the highest performers. In situ- ations of rapid change, it’s more important than ever for a group to be able to merge action and awareness, to adjust immediately by improvising. In group flow, activity becomes spontaneous, and the group acts without thinking about it first. Sawyer • Group Flow and Group Genius 33 To foster improvised innovation, you first have to create the conditions for group flow. Genius groups tend to emerge in contexts where ten key flow-enabling conditions are found. 1. The group’s goal Jazz and improv theater are relatively unstructured; the ensemble has no explicit goal. But the groups that we participate in during the work day—task forces, project groups, and committees—usually have a specific goal in mind. How can you apply the lessons from unstructured groups to more task-oriented ones? Jazz and improv theater groups are at one extreme of the spectrum of group types— the no-goal extreme. A basketball team, in contrast, has a very clear goal: to defeat the opponent. If group flow can occur in no-goal jazz groups and in focused basketball teams, what’s the connection between goals and performance? Business teams are expected to solve specific problems. They know that by the end of the meeting they have to come up with a resolution of the budget shortfall, or find a way to fix a software bug that threatens to spiral out of control. If the goal is well-understood and can be explicitly stated, it’s a problem- solving creative task. The group members then are more likely to be in flow while working toward such a goal if they’ve worked together before, if they share a lot of the same knowledge and assumptions, and when they have a compelling vision and a shared mission. One study of over 500 profes- sionals and managers in 30 companies found that the single biggest barrier to effective team performance was unclear objectives. Jazz and improv groups are at the other extreme. The only goal is intrinsic to the performance itself—to perform well and to entertain the audience. This is problem-finding creativity because the group has to “find” and define the problem as they’re solving it. At first, this might seem very different from everyday business contexts. But many of the most radical innovations occur when the question or goal isn’t known in advance. The story of how 3M created the Post-It note is legendary in the annals of innovation: research scientist Spence Silver was trying to improve the adhesive that was used in tape, and in 1968 he devel- oped an adhesive that bonded very weakly and thus failed to achieve 34 The NAMTA Journal • Vol. 40, No. 3 • Summer 2015 that goal. But Silver noticed something unusual about the In group flow, the group is focused adhesive—it formed itself into on the natural progress emerging tiny balls that were just about from their work, not on meeting the size of paper fiber. For five a deadline set by management. years, Silver told everyone who Flow is more likely to occur when would listen about this new attention is centered on the task, adhesive and tried to think of and other things are put out of a way to use it in a product. mind. Small annoyances aren’t One day, Art Fry, who worked noticed, and the external rewards in new product development, that may or may not await at the attended a seminar where end of the task are forgotten. Silver described his adhesive. Fry sang in his church choir, and he had repeatedly been frustrated when paper bookmarks fell out of his hymnal. One Sunday morning, soon after the seminar, he realized that Silver’s adhesive could be used to make a bookmark that wouldn’t fall out, and the now-famous product was born. This was just the opposite of problem-solving creativity; the secret was to come up with the right problem. The key to improvised innovation is managing a paradox: estab- lishing a goal that provides focus for the team—just enough focus so that team members can tell when they get closer to a solution— but one that’s open-ended enough for problem-finding creativity to emerge, like when the Gore engineer decided to pose himself the problem of creating a new guitar string. When auto maker BMW decides to explore a new product possibility, they outline a rough goal and then put several teams in competition, from studios in the Munich headquarters to DesignWorks in Los Angeles. Competition, mixed with loosely specified goals, can be just the right recipe for group genius. 2. Close listening Listen to Jeffrey Sweet describing a great Chicago improv the- ater show: Tonight, things are going well. Tonight, watching them improvise is like watching an expert surfer. The surfer’s incredible balance keeping him constantly poised on the crest Sawyer • Group Flow and Group Genius 35 of a wave; the cast, working from instinct rooted in hours of workshops and past improv sets, riding the crest of the moment. When they are on top, it is a sight to see. There is a thrill in watching them, a thrill born of the precariousness of their position and the ever-present threat that a misjudg- ment may send them hurtling into a wipeout. Actors and musicians both talk about group flow using metaphors like riding a wave, gliding across a ballroom with a dance partner, or lovemaking. Jazz trombonist Curtis Fuller said “when that’s really happening in a band, the cohesiveness is unbelievable. Those are the special, cherished moments. When those special moments occur, to me, it’s like ecstasy. It’s like a beautiful thing. It’s like when things blossom.” Each performer is open and listening to the others, even while they’re contributing to the performance themselves. Group flow is more likely to emerge when everyone is fully engaged—what improvisers call “deep listening,” in which you don’t plan ahead what you’re going to say, but your statements are genuinely unplanned responses to what you hear. Innovation is blocked when one or more participants already has a preconceived idea of how to get to the goal; improvisers frown on this practice, pejoratively calling it “writing the script in your head.” One consultant described a manager that fostered group flow: “She came into the meeting, and I know she had a thousand other things going on, but she was immediately there and with us. She was listening to what we had done and why, and throughout the interaction was asking good questions.” People that listen closely are energizing, and people who energize others are proven to be higher performers. 3. Complete concentration In basketball, complete concentration is required because of the fast pace of the game and because everyone’s constantly mov- ing around you, and you need to remain constantly aware of your teammates and opponents. One of the basketball players Csikszent- mihalyi interviewed said, “If you step back and think about why you are so hot all of a sudden, you get creamed.” Time becomes warped, minutes seem like hours, and the basketball can appear to move in slow motion. 36 The NAMTA Journal • Vol. 40, No. 3 • Summer 2015 In musical ensembles, group flow is challenging to maintain; the musicians are playing non-stop, yet while they’re playing they have to listen to their band members, hearing and immediately re- sponding to what they’re playing. As one musician told me, “You have to be able to divide your senses…so you still have that one thought running through your head of saying something, playing something, at the same time you’ve got to be listening to what the drummer is doing.” You can’t relax your attention or else you’ll fall behind. You might think that a high-pressure deadline might be one of those challenges that increase flow for highly skilled people. But the research shows just the opposite: group flow tends to fade in the presence of strict, high-pressure deadlines. Teresa Amabile of Harvard University has found that creativity is associated with low-pressure work environments–even though many people think they’re more creative when they work under high pressure. In group flow, the group is focused on the natural progress emerging from their work, not on meeting a deadline set by management. Flow is more likely to occur when attention is centered on the task, and other things are put out of mind. Small annoyances aren’t noticed, and the external rewards that may or may not await at the end of the task are forgotten. A strict deadline is certainly a challenge, but not the right kind of challenge; the challenges that inspire flow are those that are intrinsic to the task itself. Group flow is more likely when a group can draw a boundary, however temporary or virtual, between the group’s activity and everything else. Companies should identify a special location for group flow, or engage in a brief “rehearsal” or “warmup” period that demarcates the shift to performance. Many famous great groups have a strong feeling of group identity, of standing apart from the rest of the organization. IDEO’s way of fostering group identity is practi- cally a cliché today: almost every group orders special baseball hats or polo shirts, embroidered with a clever name for their team. The downside of complete concentration is that other important priorities can become neglected. For example, Anne Miner and her colleagues watched as the Seefoods company put on hold the development of a salad line to focus all energies on their sandwich Sawyer • Group Flow and Group Genius 37 line—even though mar- ket research had already But if group members are too similar, shown that the salad flow becomes less likely–because line would be successful. the group interaction is no longer FastTrack scientist spe- challenging. If everyone is identical cials often were perceived and shares the same habits of by others as distracting communicating, group members don’t the engineers from the need to pay close attention to what the original product plan, others are doing, and they don’t have to drawing resources from continually update their understanding well-planned strategies of what is going on—and nothing new with proven market po- and unexpected will ever emerge. tential. In general, market- ing and engineering saw the benefits of improvisation, and financial and manufacturing saw it as a source of potential inefficiency and error. 4. Being in control People get into flow when they’re in control of their actions and of their environment. This implies that groups won’t be in flow unless they’re granted autonomy by senior management. Mi- chael Crooke, the CEO of Patagonia, the outdoor clothing maker, read Csikszentmihalyi’s influential book Flow back in 1995 and has been building a flow-oriented environment at Patagonia ever since, granting autonomy to his staff. Patagonia is located near the Pacific Ocean in Ventura, California; its entrance hallway is lined with employee surfboards. Founder Yves Chouinard, a mountain climber like Csikszentmihalyi, instituted the policy “Let My People Go Surfing”—meaning that anytime the surf comes up, any employee can go surfing. Crooke is building flow into Patagonia’s teams; he says that flow “is at the center of everything I’m doing,” and compares the peak performance of Patagonia’s teams to his own experiences at the age of 19, when he was part of a Navy SEAL team. Group flow increases when people feel autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Many studies of teams have found that team autonomy is the top predictor of team performance. But in group flow, unlike solo flow, control results in a paradox—because each participant must feel in control, while at the same time remaining 38 The NAMTA Journal • Vol. 40, No. 3 • Summer 2015