7. Equal participation: Group flow is more likely to occur when all participants play an equal role in the collective creation of the final product or performance. Group flow is blocked if anyone’s skill level is significantly below the rest of the group; all of the members must have comparable skill levels. This is why professional athletes don’t enjoy playing with amateurs: Group flow can’t happen, because the professionals will be bored and the amateurs will be frustrated. It’s also blocked when one person dominates, is arrogant, or doesn’t think they have anything to learn in the conversation. 8. Familiarity: By studying many different work teams, psychologists have found that when we’re more familiar with our teammates, we’re more productive and make more effective decisions. When members of a group have been together awhile, they share a common language and a common set of unspoken understandings – what psychologists call “tacit knowledge.” Because it’s unspoken, people often don’t even realize what it is that enables them to communicate effectively. In improv, group flow happens only when all the players have mastered a body of tacit knowledge. Improv actors learn a set of guiding principles that help make it work, rules such as “Don’t deny” and “Show, don’t tell.” This shared understanding gets group members on the same page about the group’s goals – and clear goals are a cornerstone of group flow. Familiarity with one another’s communication style also helps them respond to each other quickly, and we know from Csikszentmihalyi’s research that immediate feedback is critical to flow.
9. Communication: Indeed, group flow requires constant communication. Everyone hates to go to useless meetings. But the kind of communication that leads to group flow often doesn’t happen in the conference room. Instead, it’s more likely to happen in free-wheeling, spontaneous conversations in the hallway, or in social settings after work or at lunch. 10. The potential for failure: Jazz ensembles rarely experience flow during rehearsal; group flow seems to require an audience, and the accompanying risk of real, meaningful failure. Jazz musicians and improv theater ensembles never know how successful a performance will be. Professional actors learn not to ignore the feeling of stage fright but to harness it, using it as a powerful force to push them toward flow. Research shows us over and over again that the twin sibling of innovation is frequent failure. There’s no creativity without failure, and there’s no group flow without the risk of failure. These two common research findings go hand in hand, because group flow is often what produces the most significant innovations.
Finding the balance: As this list suggests, group flow happens when many tensions are in perfect balance: between convention and novelty, between structure and improvisation, between the critical, analytic mind and the freewheeling, outside-the-box mind, between listening to the rest of the group and speaking out with your own individual voice. The central paradox of group flow is that it can only happen when there are rules and the participants share tacit understandings, but with too many rules or too much cohesion, the potential for innovation is lost. The key question facing groups that have to innovate is finding just the right amount of structure to support improvisation, but not so much structure that it smothers creativity. Jazz and Improv Theater have important messages for all groups, because they’re unique in how successfully they balance all of these tensions. The most effective business teams balance these tensions in the same way: They listen closely, they are concentrated on the task, they communicate openly so that everyone gets immediate feedback, and they trust that genius will emerge from the group, not from any one member. When that happens, groups find flow-and with it, studies show, comes more effective team performance, greater innovation, and higher workplace satisfaction. It’s good for the organization, and it’s good for its workers, too. (Source: R. Keith Sawyer, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and education at Washington University in St. Louis, is one of the country’s leading scientific experts on creativity. He elaborates on the ideas in this essay in his book Group Genius. A jazz pianist for over 20 years, Dr. Sawyer lectures to corporations, associations, and universities around the world on creativity and innovation. This article was reprinted with permission from the Greater Good Science Center).
Dr. Lewis Akpogena
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E-mail: akpogena@yahoo.com
