Kelly welcomes professor Colin Fisher back to the podcast to discuss his new book “The Collective Edge: Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups.” 

Your work in jazz improvisation and my work in theatrical improvisation – we learned how to be effective in groups. But most of the world doesn’t have that kind of training or experience. 

“Yeah, absolutely. That keeps me in business, right? That we’re not really taught how to group, But it’s funny that we’re such social animals. We spend so much of our life in groups and yet we’re not naturally adept at some really crucial parts of being in these groups.  I think that really dates back to why evolutionarily we were predisposed to be in groups. It was largely for survival, right? That we want to be in these, that we don’t have claws, we don’t have great defensive armor on the outside of us. And then we’re basically kept safe by our ability to distribute labor that somebody could keep watch at night, that we can go hunt and gather in ways that capitalize on differences among us.” 

We’ve become such a culture drunk on individualism that we forget that life wouldn’t be livable without effective group action. 

“If you look in the self-help aisle or the leadership aisle of the bookstore, you’re going to see a lot of stories of great individuals. You’re going to get a lot of advice on improving the island of you. And it’s not that any of that’s wrong, right? Like there’s so many people I respect who are telling us great things about how to improve ourselves. But that if that’s the only thing we do, we’re not going to accomplish great things because the evidence is most of the great stuff in the world is getting done by groups that solve the thorny problems. The most creative things, the most innovative things are coming out of groups in part because the world’s just getting more complicated and we need diverse expertise. We need a lot more brains and labor that is engaged in solving these problems. So, individualism is a threat when we think the way we’re going to solve these problems is by finding the next hero or the reason that our organization or our team is failing is because we’ve got this one bad apple.” 

A mentor of mine, Sheldon Patinkin, used to say that playing the Spolin improvisational games makes you an ensemble. The game playing builds trust. 

“The kind of trust that we use most at work is the trust that you’re going to deliver what you say you’re going to deliver and of a certain quality at a certain time. And that kind of trust doesn’t get developed by things like trust falls.  And so, the problem then is the way we get that kind of trust is by working together – that just getting into the game, as it sounds like your mentor would have said: that we start, and that by starting and actually collaborating successfully, then we develop the kind of trust we really need when we’re going to be a team. And so, the advice to do all this stuff that’s completely divorced from the task, that’s completely divorced from what we’re going to actually need to do together, that kind of advice really misleads a lot of people.”