Making the Team: A Guide for Managers

Conclusions

Creativity is the Holy Grail of teamwork. This is certainly true for creative teams, but also true for problem-solving and tactical teams. However, many of our intuitions about creativity are incorrect. We see this most clearly in the case of face-to-face brainstorming. The process of generating novel and useful ideas is often blocked in teams. Most creative ideas are applications or transfers of concepts, ideas, and processes from one domain to another. This may sound easy or straightforward, but most people under most conditions do not transfer ideas across domains, even when it would be useful. Johannes Kepler's analogy of the sun and planets as magnets; conceiving the heart as a pump; or comparing the human mind to a computer ...