Zeitguide  “Buisness and Finance” Image by Kristopher Porter

Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

A sign of the times: Walter Isaacson, known for his deep biographies—Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Ben Franklin, Henry Kissinger—has abandoned the individual genius genre.

In his soon-to-be-released book The Innovators, Isaacson notes that “There are thousands of books celebrating people we biographers portray, or mythologize, as lone inventors. I’ve produced a few myself…. But we have far fewer tales of collaborative creativity. Innovation comes from teams more often than from light-bulb moments of loan genius.”

Everyone is talking about the power of collaboration.  Inc. online has a whole channel dedicated to team building. Crowdsourcing produces everything from gadgets to commercials. Dozens of recent business books, such as Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid The Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results, offer advice on optimizing networks. Even large management consulting firms like McKinsey are publishing reports on the keys to successful collaboration.

And businesses are literally breaking down the walls to boost collaborative interaction. Ed Catmull in his recent book Creativity, Inc. describes how he and his partners at Pixar moved their offices from the top floor to the second floor, “right in the middle of things” and located bathrooms strategically in the center of the building to encourage employees from different departments to exchange ideas.

At the same time, companies such as our friends at Undercurrent are re-shaping corporations’ organizational structure into a “holacracy.” A holacratic company replaces its linear hierarchy with overlapping autonomous teams, or “circles,” where all members wear multiple hats and spread their contributions by moving nimbly from one circle to another.

But, not everyone buys the collaboration cure. Susan Cain, author of the recent bestseller Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking fears that “our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place.” She holds that “people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.”

ZEITGUIDE friend Joshua Wolf Shenk  splits the difference: “Lone genius isn’t good, but neither is a ‘hive-mind’,” he tells us. His recent book Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs argues that it takes two to birth the new.  Writing chapters on John & Paul, Larry & Sergei, even Jobs and Woszniak, Shenk suggests that “The lone-genius myth prevents us from grappling with a series of paradoxes about creative pairs: that distance doesn’t impede intimacy, and is often a crucial ingredient of it; that competition and collaboration are often entwined.” One person can be the blue-sky visionary while the other reels the ideas down to Earth.

Why such a spike in fascination about optimal conditions for collaboration? For businesses, mobilizing whole teams effectively is the only way to move fast enough to stay relevant and ahead. At the same time, through cloud technology, mobile devices, enterprise social platforms, and big data work-force analysis, we can better communicate, collaborate, and even calculate collaborative success.

But there’s more to it.

The social, business and scientific questions we seek to answer, as well as the global-scale problems that we must solve—we are acknowledging that those are now bigger than any one person can tackle.

 Whether we want to sell more products or arrest climate change, like it or not, we’re going to have to work together.

Keep Learning,

Brad Grossman & Team ZEITGUIDE