Book Review.

Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

by Linda A. Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove, and Kent Lineback. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014. 272 pages, hardcover.

Reviewed by Kerri Cissna, Miami University, CissnaK@miamioh.edu

Innovation is a hot commodity in today’s VUCA environment, where leaders frequently navigate situations that are volatile, uncertain, chaotic, and ambiguous. Collective Genius provides a framework for the art and practice of leading innovation, redefining the concept of leadership development for the 21st century by shifting the focus from individual brilliance to fostering team creativity (Hill, et. al., 2014). Hierarchical models of leadership were necessary in the past when the person at the top had more access to information, education, and resources to empower judgment, decision-making, and vision setting. However, we now live in a digital age where information can be disseminated more easily and ideas for improvement can come from any level of the organization. 

Dr. Linda Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and Faculty Chair of the Leadership Initiative is regarded as one of the top experts in leadership and innovation. As co-author of Collective Genius, she states that “to encourage innovation, leaders have to unleash the “slice of genius” each person has, which represents their talent and passion. Once it is unleashed, it has to be harnessed or leveraged to make it useful. This requires leaders to amplify the differences that people have, to take advantage of the contributions each person can make to the organization, no matter what level that person is at. In fact, many of the best ideas percolate from the bottom up.”

This book challenges traditional leadership paradigms, and advocates for leaders to act as architects of collaborative cultures rather than solitary visionaries. This research emphasizes the important role leaders can play in fostering an organizational environment that is conducive to continuous improvement, likening the role to a “stage-setter” rather than a “star-performer.” 

The authors provide several examples from various organizations such as Volkswagen, Google, eBay, and Pixar to illustrate the ways that leaders can cultivate innovation by enabling the collective genius of teams. They studied 16 women and men located across 12 industries in 7 different countries, and analyzed pages of field notes to identify patterns in leading innovation, which they found is not about creating a vision but inspiring others to execute it. Innovation, in this case, is defined as any product or service that is new and useful (Hill, et. al, 2014).  

Figure 1. 

According to this framework, Collective Genius emerges from a culture where people are both willing and able to engage in the challenging work of creative problem solving aimed at innovation (see Figure 1). A willingness to innovation stems from organizations that have a clear purpose, shared values, and clearly defined rules for engagement. The latter can be further explained as having an understanding of how to interact with each other and engage with problems. The ability to innovate emerges from organizational settings that embed creative abrasion into the creative problem solving process (diversity of thought and ability to disagree without defensiveness), creative agility (flexibility to experiment quickly, pivot, and iterate), and creative resolution (an ability to integrate ideas into action). By emphasizing creative abrasion, agility, and resolution, Hill and her co-authors provide a compelling framework for cultivating innovation. This resource offers actionable insights into leading innovation in diverse and dynamic environments, making it a valuable tool for leadership development programs and organizational training initiatives. 

This notion of collective genius is not new. Aristotle described something similar by saying, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” which easily applied to the importance of collective genius. Similarly, Phil Jackson, former basketball coach for the Chicago Bulls, shared that the strength of each team is each individual member, while the strength of each member is the team. Groups or teams with collective genius create a unique synergy that cannot be replicated, like one’s favorite rock band or cast of Saturday Night Live. If one person leaves the group, the dynamic shifts and becomes a new entity altogether. Even though the idea of collective genius is not new, the framework that emerged from Hill et. al. is something useful and new that can be leveraged in the realm of leadership development theory.

While the Collective Genius model provides a timely and practical framework for navigating today’s complex, innovation-driven environment, there are a few areas that should be considered in using this for management education. The first is the necessity for psychological safety to be present on teams in order to create the willingness and ability to innovate. Psychological safety emerged from the Aristotle Project conducted by Google in 2012 as one of the components of a high performing team (in addition to structure/clarity of roles, dependability, meaning, and impact). To further understand the concept of psychological safety, one can visit the work of Dr. Amy Edmondson who wrote the Fearless Organization and has an inventory on psychological safety that can be administered to teams. 

And finally, once a team is willing and able to innovate, it is essential that they be provided tools for practical application. This is where human-centered design or creative problem solving techniques can be introduced as practical means for identifying a problem, ideating solutions, prototyping/testing/pivoting/iterating, and finally implementation. Design thinking (DT) is a human-centered approach to innovation that gained significant attention as a method for enhancing organizational innovation and problem-solving capabilities across various industries when Tim Brown published an article in the Harvard Business Review (2008). Management schools have been utilizing this method and the tools for design thinking to empower students to think outside the box to find unique solutions to complex problems. The process starts with empathy to identify a real problem for real humans, and then utilizes curiosity to uncover the sources, courage to ideate novel solutions that might take some form or risk, resilience in prototype-testing-pivoting-iterating, and collaboration in the implementation process.  

At least, that is how we teach the method at Miami University’s Farmer School of Business, where over 1400 first year business students learn this method in solving a problem for a real client in the First Year Integrated Core. This program was developed in 2016 as a requirement for students who take four interdisciplinary courses in a cohort of 30 students, which culminates with a “client challenge” during the final three weeks of the semester where student teams work on the same project for all four classes. Through this experiential learning, students begin to recognize the importance, and difficulty, in working across industries to solve a unique challenge for a client. 

Through this practical application of collective genius, many challenges have emerged. It is less time consuming for a leader to share a vision and bark commands. It takes more time and energy to identify and harness each person’s individual strengths and to align personal goals with organizational mission in a way that will leverage the genius in each person. However, the innovative solutions to complex problems that emerge from interdisciplinary teams and diversity of thought cannot be replicated in a vacuum. People from different industries speak different languages, so it takes more time to establish trust, consistency, and coherence in problem solving. This is also what makes collective genius a difficult concept to measure or evaluate.  

Access to information is another challenge when it comes to innovating through collective genius. While technology allows us to communicate more effectively, and share information more broadly, it is rare for a leader to give open access to information transparently. However, there are examples of leaders who distribute information openly, such as Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, the world’s largest semiconductor company, who shared in a recent interview that he has 60 direct reports whom he shares information with openly in order to leverage the creative capacity of his team (Stripe, 2024).   

As disruptive technologies continue to reshape our workplace, leadership development programs can take advantage of the opportunities to work differently and more efficiently.  Digital transformation presents a unique opportunity for organizational capabilities to advance under the right time of (decentralized) leadership models. For this to happen, collaboration needs to be leveraged for creative problem solving and innovation through this notion of collective genius theory with applied methods of design thinking.  

Collective Genius is an invaluable resource for leaders, educators and practitioners alike. We live in a time of constant change, where the problems we face are too complex for one person to solve. This book’s emphasis on creative abrasion, agility, and resolution offers a powerful toolkit for cultivating innovation, and this resource deserves a place in the curriculum of any leadership development program committed to building collaborative cultures and empowering the genius of teams to lead the creation of our future. 

References

Hill, L. A., Brandeau, G., Truelove, E., & Lineback, K. (2014). Collective genius. Harvard business review, 92(6), 94-102.

Stripe. (2024, May 21).  A conversation with NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang (Video). YouTube. https://youtu.be/8Pfa8kPjUio?si=z6clqwBZFc9smV-F\