The Myths of Creativity: Conflict Breeds Creativity
Twitter Summary: Teams that promote constructive conflict consistently outperform teams that focus on cohesion.
Principle
My recent posts have been about David Burkus’ book The Myths of Creativity and some of the great ideas he shares. For this post I want to write a bit about what Burkus calls The Cohesive Myth.
A lot of us buy into this myth, where we think “most creative ideas and products come from teams that suspend criticism and focus on consensus.” Burkus shows through a few examples, like Pixar, how bogus this idea is. In reality, teams that promote constructive conflict in their creative process consistently outperform teams that focus on cohesion.
Burkus makes his point when he shares a story about Pixar animation and how they make films...