Small teams are more creative
A recent meta-study by the University of Chicago compares
the creativity of teams of various sizes. [1]
It concludes that team size has a significant influence on the amount and type
of innovation and creativity they exhibit. Or to precis the findings: large
teams innovate incrementally, while breakthroughs happen in small teams.
The study focused on innovation and creativity in science
and technology. Small teams are much more likely to generate the “root” papers
that characterise a major advance in thinking. It does not necessarily follow
that this effect of size would apply to all teams, but it is logical that the
same or similar mechanisms may be at work. In exploring ideas, smaller teams
tended to seek out a much wider range of perspectives and references. Larger
teams tended to rely on recent publications and current convention — creating
a kind of herd mentality. Says one of the authors, Lingfei Wu: “Small teams remember forgotten
ideas, ask questions and create new directions, whereas large teams chase
hotspots and forget less popular ideas, answer questions and stabilize
established paradigms.” Every incremental increase in team size reduced
this activity.
Practical ways, in which teams and team coaches can make use of
these insights include:
- Match team size to the task in hand. Larger
teams are better at getting things done, says this study, so linking them with
smaller teams can challenge their assumptions and increase the overall level of
creativity.
- Recognise and work with people’s preferences
for the size of team that allows them to contribute best. Highly creative
people may feel stifled in a large team environment, for example. Others may
get a greater buzz from having a foot in both camps.
- Help the team develop its own measures of
innovation and creativity and use these to determine where to create smaller
sub-teams. Even teams in creative industries can be myopic about their level
and focus of creativity. For example, when a graphic design team of 14 people
asked its customers to rate it on various measures of creativity, it found it
had over-estimated the difference that customers perceived between it and its
competitors. Moreover, it realised that it had a very low history of innovation
in non-design aspects of its business, such as customer relationship
management.
- Recognise that “social loafing” (in which
everyone puts in less effort when there are more people, on whom to offload
responsibility) applies to creative thinking as well as to task performance. In
fact, the social loafing effect may well be greater in respect of creative
thinking, because it requires a lot more investment of mental energy.
- Support large teams in thinking about how they
can behave more like small teams. One simple technique is to split the large
team into groups of three. Each group has three months to develop and present a
radically new idea, or a new take on an old and long discarded idea. A key
criterion is that the idea must be disruptive
to current thinking or practice. Group membership changes each quarter,
with two people remaining and one moving on to another trio.
The more teams are aware of how size influences thinking patterns
and behaviour, the more choices they have in how they tackle their tasks
together.
© David Clutterbuck,
2019
[1] Lu, W and
Evans A Large
teams develop, and small teams disrupt, science and technology, Nature (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-0941-9 ,
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-0941-9
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