The 7 Key Traits of Creative Teams

1. Innovation Emerges Over Time


One person can not come up with the whole idea, each person in a team contributes and bit by bit a whole idea comes together. Successful innovations come together when the right combination of little ideas become a whole.

2. Successful Collaborative Teams Practice Deep Listening

To work successfully as a team, you need to listen to what others are saying, and at the same time be using these thoughts to work out your own ideas. It is a delicate but essential balance, most people spend too much time planning their own actions and not enough time listening to and observing others.

3. Team Members Build on Their Collaborators' Ideas

When teams are using 'deep listening' well, all ideas that are generated are built from previous ideas. Although one person may get the credit for the idea, it is hard to believe that they would have come up with it away from the group thinking.

4. Only Afterwards Does The Meaning of Each Idea Become Clear


Even a single idea can not be credited to one person, as an idea does not take on its true importance until it is taken up, reinterpreted and applied by others. In a creative collaboration, each person acts without knowing what their actions mean. The meaning will be added upon later through the collaboration and team thinking.

5. Surprising Questions Emerge

The most transformative creativity is when a group finds a problem that no one has found before, or finds a new way to consider the problem. When a team works this way, ideas are often transformed from ideas to problems and questions. The most creative groups can find new problems, rather than solving old ones.

6. Innovation is Inefficient

Some ideas are just bad ideas, some are good ideas in themselves, but the other ideas that would be necessary to term them into innovation have not been found yet. Improvised innovation makes more mistakes, but also makes incredible hits. When we look back on an innovation, we remember the chain of good ideas, not the ones that led to dead ends.

7. Innovation Emerges from Bottom Up

The most innovative teams are the ones that can restructure themselves and adjust to their environments, they don't need a strong leader to tell them what to do as they work as a team. The collaboration of the creative group translates thoughts of the individual into group innovation. When a successful innovation appears, it is often so imaginative and creative that no single mind could have come up with it.

Sawyer, (2008) Group Genius.