Leigh Thompson - Creative Conspiracy: The New Rules of Breakthrough Collaboration

T hink about the most important project or task that is facing you at your job today. Ask yourself whether you are able to achieve your goal by working completely independently. If the answer is no, then list every single person you are depending on in some wayeven if you have subordinates, you should list them and indicate how you depend on them. When I posed this question to several hundred people, no one said that they were completely independent. In fact, most people named at least three and sometimes one hundred people they rely on to achieve nearly anything.

Any time you cannot achieve your goals without the cooperation of others, you are collaborating. Collaborative teams realize that they are dependent on each other to achieve an important goal. Collaboration is the art and science of combining peoples talents, skills, and knowledge to achieve a common goal. Creative collaboration is the ability of teams and their leaders to organize, motivate, and combine talent to generate new and useful ideas. Teams that conspire to commit creative and innovative acts are engaged in a creative conspiracy. When collaboration is conscious, planned, and shared with others, excitement builds and a conspiracy develops. The teams that can meet the creative challenges posed to them are the hallmark of the most successful organizations and the subject of this book, which contains state-of-the art research on collaboration and innovation.

In my research investigation of over one thousand team leaders spanning over fifteen years, 41 percent indicate that leading the creative team is of paramount importance. And the trend appears to be rising. As recently as ten years ago, only 39 percent mentioned creativity as a key leadership challenge; this rose to 47 percent since 2010. Yet although the result of some collaboration is greater than the sum of the parts, at other times, it falls far short. Of the different types of work that teams do, the creative aspect is the least understood, the most elusive, the most costly, and the one that managers and leaders most often unknowingly sabotage. Thus, understanding how to optimally structure the creative team for success is essential.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of unfounded beliefs about creativity. When businesses and teams operate using faulty myths about creativity and teams, they hold their teams back in their effectiveness. This book introduces an approach and easy-to-implement best practices for optimizing team creativity and collaboration. These practical strategies enable collaborative teams and their leaders to avoid the pitfalls that well-meaning teams often fall into and instead, capitalize on what actually works with regard to creative collaboration.