Does repeat collaboration really kill creativity?

Written by Andrew O’connell

Monday, 15 March 2010 18:29

Most new project development managers would die for a pair of innovators like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, a team that maintained its creativity year after revelatory year. So why are executives consistently told by researchers that repeated collaboration smothers creativity? Very soon after they started collaborating, Lennon and McCartney became a well-oiled innovation machine. “Every time we went to sit down—and it was normally about a three-hour writing session—we never came out without a finished song,” McCartney told Reader’s Digest. “So that was like 200 days that we sat down to do that. And never had a dry moment.” But here come the professors. In a recent issue of the Academy of Management Review Paul F. Skilton and Kevin J. Dooley of Arizona State University maintain that keeping creative teams together on multiple projects is a good way to get bad results. In fact, they say, a single prior collaboration is enough to limit a group’s creativity the next time out. That’s because roles and rules get established quickly when people work together, and friction and surprise—both crucial for creativity—fade away. Lennon and McCartney seem not to have gotten the memo that creative teams constantly need to “restructure and renew” their modes of thinking to overcome mental inertia. One of the best ways to do this, Skilton and Dooley suggest, is to bring in someone different. A friend or subordinate won’t do; teams need to recruit “true outsiders” with new knowledge, new relationships and a “lack of deference” to the status quo. So why were Lennon and McCartney able to go on innovating without bringing in, say, Paul Anka, composer of the Sinatra hit “My Way”? I don’t have an answer. But I do have a theory. I think there really isn’t any contradiction between what the Beatles were able to accomplish and what current research shows. Lennon and McCartney did bring in true outsiders, but they were all named Lennon. The group’s founder metamorphosed into persona after persona—rocker, author, philosopher, activist. They were often abrasive, and they were never deferring. But despite all the change, Lennon maintained something very special: a well-honed working relationship with McCartney. John and Paul, to lift a quote from Skilton and Dooley, were able to overcome “their own [mental] inertia just enough to stimulate creative abrasion without eroding the efficiency of repeated collaboration.” That’s something for every business to think about. Andrew O’Connell is an editor with the Harvard Business Review Group. In Photo: The original manuscript of the song “All You Need is Love,” seen in London in this July 2005 file photo. (Alan Weller/Bloomberg News)