INDIVIDUAL
Creativity
VS THE COLLECTIVE
What can be considered the most important regarding creativity within a work team? A reflection on the individual and the collective
You have probably heard that two heads think better than one, right? Now imagine when you have a plenty of then. It is proven that, considering creativity within a working team, creativity within a working team can be significantly more productive than individually. Still, working individually has its advantages. But in the end both, individual and collective encounter distinct challenges when it comes to creative thinking and creative processes.
Having a group of people working towards a goal and involved within a creative procedure can improve all the process and enhance to better results for the simple fact that none team member is equal. Having diversity can provide a wider range of experience, skill and thinking patterns. Besides, there is always a mix of personalities and team roles that, when organized strategically can maximize a TEXT BY CLAUDIA DE LIMA
team’s performance. For example, from my experiences at Creativity classes, I’ve noticed that, in collective creative processes flows there were team members who were better in coming up with new ideas, other were more active in questioning these ideas, others were good at analyzing ideas and others were better at planning their implementation. In the end, this enrichment through the
multiplicity of personalities brought value to the process and consequently to the end results. In addition, since the members of the team had different backgrounds, we ended up complementing each other’s ideas for a common purpose. Furthermore, I consider that most of the experiences completed at classes, that involved creative problem-solving methodologies, make more sense when performed in teams. Since creativity is a complex phenomenon and involves a dynamic interaction between people and the environment in which they find themselves, problems seems to arise when this interaction is not fluid or it
encounters obstacles. In this way, when working within a team, you are always dependent of each other and a failed team dynamic can lead to team failure. For example, whenever there is a bad environment, or a demotivator member in a team, this will affect all the process. At the experiments performed in classes I encounter a few obstacles that contributed negatively to the creative process. One example was the fact that my team had a critical member that discourage all the ideas in earlier stages. In the opposite way, I also faced situations where I was working with a very motivated team that facilitated the creative process and took our team to performed better. In conclusion both individual and collective challenges encounter advantages and disadvantages. While being creative individually is a riskier task, where I felt more vulnerable to fail, even though I had a good background with past experiences, I have noticed that the result, at least most of the time, were always more rich and complete when I was involved in working teams. Although the quality of the process and end-result will always be dependent of the team dynamic. I believe that the team members and their personalities, experiences, skills and thinking patterns are some of the key factors to team prosperity. From my personal experience, within my work as a designer and from the experiments performed at classes, I think it is easier to come up with more creative ideas when working within teams – “A problem shared is a problem halved”. CREATIVITY 02 •