BEHAVIOUR 03 OF 10 . COLLABORATING

Why do people say they want big ideas and then say no?

Because under uncertainty they cannot see that it is a big idea. They are not lying about wanting one. The novelty that makes it valuable is the same novelty that makes it feel risky, and the risk is what they see first.

Collaborating is your creativity, with others

Think, do, be. This one has two halves, and almost everybody does only the first.

The first half is finding the people who make your thinking better. The second is understanding what every person in the chain actually has at stake.

I was very good at the first half for about fifteen years and had not properly noticed the second. Here is how I found out.

The rarest person in a collaboration is not the one with the ideas

Richard Connell, Head of the Sony Music Creative Group, and the best collaborator I have had.

A real collaboration produces a mess. Twenty thoughts, six half-insights, four ideas that overlap, and a room of people who each hold a different piece and none of whom can see the whole of it. That is not a failure state. That is what the middle looks like.

The scarce person is not the one with another idea. It is the one who can look at that pile and say what it is trying to become, out loud, in words the rest of us recognise.

Richard did that. He would take whatever was on the table and hand it back with a shape in it that you had not put there, and the room would go, yes, that is what we are doing.

I could never explain how we actually did it. How you get from a pile of unconnected things to the one that matters. I would try, and it would come out wrong. And one day he said, it is like that film, A Beautiful Mind, where you watch it light up and Russell Crowe’s character sees the result before anybody else in the room.

He named it better than I could. Which is precisely the point. That was the thing he did.

If you have somebody like that in your working life, that relationship is worth more than any single idea you will have this year. And if you are that person, understand that it is the rarer job. Ideas are not scarce. Being able to say what a room full of them adds up to is scarce.

Where this came from

Richard and I had an idea on a music project, a made for television concept built around Teatro, a boyband who were briefly a hit.

We took it to Google, who at that moment were the only people on earth who could do it with us. They said yes.

So now we are building it. A global collaboration, real partners, the difficult half solved.

Then we took it to the artist’s manager.

He said no.

I remember the feeling precisely. What do you mean, no. This is the best idea anybody has brought you. And he said, very calmly, that it could go very wrong and make his artist look silly.

Best idea ever that never happened.

What I got wrong, and it took me years to see it

I spent that entire project with the people who could say yes.

Richard, who made it better. Google, who could build it. Partners who wanted in. Every one of them a maker, and makers love a new thing, because a new thing is what we are for.

The only person who could kill it was a guardian. His whole job is one artist’s reputation. And I brought him in at the end, with a finished thing, and asked him to be brave about it in a single meeting.

He was not being stupid. He was doing his actual job, on the last day, with no time and full exposure. Of course he said no.

A collaboration is only as strong as its most exposed member. And that person is almost never in the early meetings, because the early meetings are the fun ones, and they are not fun to have with somebody whose job is risk.

What the evidence says

The main ingredient in good collaboration is not talent. Amy Edmondson named psychological safety in 1999: the shared belief that you can take an interpersonal risk in this group without being punished for it. Then Google went looking for what makes teams work, studied 180 of their own teams over two years, and expected the answer to be star performers and resources. It was not. Five factors came out and psychological safety was the one everything else rested on.

Which is a strange thing to type, because Google is the partner who said yes to us. The company that later proved this about itself was, in our story, the easy part.

And people reject creative ideas while sincerely believing they want them. Mueller, Melwani and Goncalo (Psychological Science, 2012) put numbers on the thing I could not understand in that room. Around 95 per cent of people rate creativity positively when you ask them straight out. But when those same people were made to feel uncertain, implicit testing showed them associating creativity with words like poison and agony, while their stated views did not shift at all.

Then the finding that actually explains the manager. The bias made people worse at recognising creativity. Participants with low tolerance for uncertainty rated an objectively creative product concept as less creative than everyone else did.

So he was not rejecting a great idea. Under uncertainty, he could not see that it was one. And if you had asked him whether he valued creative thinking he would have said yes, and he would have meant it.

That changes what you do about it. You cannot argue somebody out of this with a better deck, because the deck is not the problem. You either lower the uncertainty, or you bring them in early enough that the idea is partly theirs.

What to do on Monday

Take whatever you are working on and write down every person who could stop it.

Not the people who have to approve it. The people who have something to lose if it goes wrong. It is usually one person, and they are usually nowhere near the project.

Now put that person in the next conversation instead of the last one. Not to get sign-off. To find out what they are actually protecting, because that will change the idea.

And the changed idea is the one that survives. The version that includes what they are protecting is better than the one you are holding now. That is not compromise. That is the collaboration.

Collaborating is behaviour three of ten, and it sits with the BIF 6 Steps in Module 2, Collaborating Your Creativity at Work.

Sources

  1. Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. doi:10.2307/2666999
  2. Google Project Aristotle: 180 Google teams studied from 2012 over roughly two years; five factors identified, with psychological safety underpinning the rest. Google credits Edmondson’s 1999 work as the framework.
  3. Mueller, J. S., Melwani, S., & Goncalo, J. A. (2012). The bias against creativity: why people desire but reject creative ideas. Psychological Science, 23(1), 13-17. doi:10.1177/0956797611421018
  4. BIF source: Matt Hart on Richard Connell and the Teatro project. Richard Connell was Head of the Sony Music Creative Group.