The mythology that "human beings are at their most creative alone."
Submitted by: John Warner on Sep 18, 2007 at 3:37 am
Tagged with: Featured Articles, Miscellany
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In the September 17, 2007 Forbes magazine article, "Who Will Say :'I Promise to Lay Off'?", Paul Johnson argues that, "Human beings can often work well in teams, but they are at their most creative alone." Ayn Rand makes a similar case in the libertarian scripture, Atlas Shrugged. John Galt preaches, "Is it ever proper to help another man? No, if he demands it as his right or as a duty that you owe him. Yes, if it's your own free choice based on your judgment of the value of that person and his struggle."
I used to believe this; the older I get the less I do. The most explosive creativity is often found at the intersection of diverse organizations, disciplines and cultures. Diversity can result in conflict, or it can result in synergy. To realize synergy and avoid conflict, there have to be rules. We don't get to each make up our own rules, but there are community standards we all must abide by.
John Seely Brown, former head of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, wrote a very interesting article, Creation Nets: Getting the Most from Open Innovation. "Creation nets" is a concept by which he describes the synergy that occurs across diverse organizations. He observes, "Creation nets begin with a network organizer, in the role of gatekeeper, which decides who participates in the network." Great ideas don't spontaneously combust out of the ether. Every great idea I've seen implemented in my life had a individual champion pushing it. That sounds a bit like Johnson and Rand's argument that the individual is the all powerful agent of progress.
But then the radical individualists take their case too far, while Brown, on the other hand, describes his individual champion as a community organizer. "Creation nets work by mobilizing hundreds or thousands of independent entities in the pursuit of distributed, collaborative, and cumulative innovation. Mobilizing such a range of participants requires a precise set of institutional mechanisms to make clear who assembles the network, who can participate in it, how disputes will be resolved, and how performance will be measured." In other words, the network organizer creates the rules through which the community as a whole is greater than the individual sum of its parts. The network organizer is a leader.
Too many rules results in bureaucracy, or worse tyranny. Human potential is wasted. Too few rules, though, results in conflict, or worse anarchy. The genus of leadership is understanding the right balance in the rules that creates synergy without stifling creativity.
A year ago, I had a fascinating discussion with Virgina Uldrick, founder of the SC Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities. If anyone I know is an individual hero in the mold of Ayn Rand it is Virginia. Imagine the audacity of an arts teacher visualizing that she could create "the best arts high school in the country and perhaps the world," and then going out and actually doing it. After telling me for over an hour that she was an out-of-the-box thinker and that she recruited teachers who were out-of-the-box thinkers, I finally asked how on earth all those out-of-the-box thinkers ever got anything done.
For example, she had hired a dance teacher who had won an award that only Baryshnikov and Nureyev had also won. Clearly she couldn't tell that person how to teach dance. But at the same time, she was accountable to the SC Legislature who had provided her the resources that made the school possible. In describing the creative tension inherent in being out-of-the-box while at the same time being accountable for results, Virginia articulated one of the most profound prescriptions I have ever heard. "I give him the rules of the agency, and we have to live within those rules. Then, I will make it possible for him to do what he does, and wants to do, at the best level possible." Wow!
Virginia defines the rules that allow her to deliver what she is accountable for. The school won't continue to exist unless she delivers, and it's in their mutual self-interest for the school to continue to exist. And then within those rules she will create a stage for her preeminent teacher that allows him to perform at the highest level. Only the dance teacher is capable at performing at the highest level, because he has spent a lifetime in often lonely preparation. But the teacher doesn't perform in thin air, but on the solid stage that Virginia has built for him, and that stage comes with constraints. Actually, so did the stage at the Bolshoi Ballet in Russia where he honed his craft.
Johnson argues that Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein "were men accustomed to long hours engaged in solitary thought, the reclusive examination of specimens or the hermit like working out of long pages of equations." That's true. Like them, Virginia Uldrick also spent a lifetime studying her discipline and so had the deep base of informed intuition that made her uniquely capable of leading.
It's just poppycock to suggest though that, "Human beings can often work well in teams, but they are at their most creative alone." None of the great thinkers Johnson mentions worked in a vacuum. Each of them built on the legacy of others. And each of them lived in a fertile culture where he benefited from the thoughts and observations of colleagues. It is true that each of the great thinkers came to original insights that changed the world, but it is not true the any of them engaged in a solitary pursuit. Each of them was like the dance teacher performing at the highest level on a stage built by others, and it doesn't diminish their accomplishment to acknowledge that each of them excelled in communities.
It is in our enlightened self-interest for our communities to build the stages so that the geniuses in our lives can perform at the highest level in their disciplines. If we fail to build these stages, whether they be excellent schools or venture capital funds, we will miss out on the richness that these geniuses can bring to our lives. That's the part I missed when I was younger.