Colin Fisher is an organizational scientist and Associate Professor of Organizations and Innovation at University College London’s School of Management. He has written about group dynamics for both popular science and management audiences, with his work having been profiled in Forbes, The Times, NPR, and the BBC.
What’s the big idea?
Why do some groups just click, while others fall apart? The Collective Edge unlocks the secrets to building a powerful group or contributing to its success as a member. With the right internal dynamics and structural foundation, a group can be poised and ready to collaborate effectively and become more than the sum of its parts.
Below, Colin shares five key insights from his new book, The Collective Edge: Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups. Listen to the audio version—read by Colin himself—below, or in the Next Big Idea App.
1. The lone genius is a myth—try a collective perspective.
We love stories of lone geniuses. Narratives of individuals shaping the world hold a special appeal, whether they are scientists, CEOs, performers, or prime ministers. But lone geniuses are more myth than reality. The truth is that groups make the world go round.
For instance, who invented the lightbulb? If you said Thomas Edison, you’d be wrong. Incandescent bulbs were invented before Edison was born. Edison built on the work of many others, and he didn’t work alone. His breakthrough was a team effort with a group he called the “Muckers,” whose names are mostly lost to history.
Today, teams dominate the landscape in terms of breakthrough ideas. One study of millions of patents and research papers found that teams were over six times more likely than individuals to produce breakthrough discoveries.
So why do we keep telling the wrong story? Our brains are biased. Psychologists call it fundamental attribution error: we over-explain success with personal traits and ignore the context that made it possible. We also inflate our own contributions. In one study, group members estimated their share of the team’s output; the totals reached 235 percent.
This myth makes us worse at building teams: idolizing individual brilliance, hiring “stars,” purging “bad apples,” and hoping for lightning to strike. If we view the world from a collective perspective, we can ask better questions: What group conditions made this success possible—and how can we recreate them? Next time you admire a breakthrough, look past the most obvious hero and ask: Who else was involved, and what made their collaboration work?
2. Synergy is real, but elusive.
Synergy sounds like a buzzword, but it’s very real. I’ve felt it as a jazz musician, where groups I’ve been a part of spontaneously bring ideas out of one another that none of us could have conceived alone. Research shows that synergy is possible. Great musical ensembles, sports teams, and businesses bring together diverse knowledge, skills, and perspectives to become more than the sum of their parts.
But synergy is rare. Most groups underperform because of predictable process losses—coordination breakdowns and low effort. One classic study showed that members of a two-person group contribute only about 70 percent of what they would working alone. It gets worse as groups grow—a group of six yields only about 40 percent of its members’ output.
Still, when synergy happens, it’s the pinnacle of group and human performance. Miles Davis’s album Kind of Blue is my favorite example. Each musician had a distinct voice—Coltrane’s “sheets of sound”, Evans’s lush harmonies, Davis’s restraint. Together, they made each other better. Each musician’s idiosyncratic approach accentuated the beauty of the others, making the whole more than the sum of the individuals.
“A group of six yields only about 40 percent of its members’ output.”
Anthropologist Margaret Mead was right: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” But it isn’t easy because our group tendencies sometimes bring out the worst in us.
3. Groups can bring out the worst in us.
Groups are often in the news for the wrong reasons: conformity, polarization, prejudice, conflict, and general mass stupidity. Politicians prey on the dark side of our primitive tendencies to praise “us” and blame “them.” Social media can strengthen intergroup hate while isolating us from our local communities. Our tendency to form groups underlies political conflict, war, and atrocities.
Our Paleolithic brains have some dangerous tendencies. One of the most pernicious is conformity. Conformity pressures are powerful and automatic. If you’re in a group watching a street performer, you clap because everyone else claps, even when you’re privately unimpressed. In meetings, that same instinct silences dissenting voices.
Conformity may sound bad, but it has a purpose. Conformity keeps groups together and allows them to coordinate smoothly—we sometimes need to go along to get along. But on the dark side of conformity, sometimes we’re pushed to conform to the will of the collective.
Conformity pressures are at the root of many catastrophic decisions, cult-like thinking, and extremism. Online echo-chambers and increasing political polarization are making these forces stronger than ever. But the dark side isn’t inevitable if we structure our groups carefully.
4. Use group structure to stack the deck toward synergy.
Great groups don’t emerge purely by chance. They’re purposely designed to maximize their chances of achieving synergy. A group’s composition, goals, tasks, and norms collectively make up its structure. Structure is the most powerful way to build effective, happier groups. The best-designed groups are small teams working interdependently toward clear goals, with motivating tasks and norms that foster psychological safety and autonomy.
Too often, however, leaders are careless about group structure. They form teams based on politics and availability, rather than selecting the optimal mix of knowledge and skills. They charge teams with vague goals yet micromanage the process. They offer the team boring, demotivating tasks. When problems arise, many try to directly alter the group process—holding meetings to diffuse conflict or giving rousing speeches to motivate disengaged members. One study found that when faced with a struggling group, 84 percent tried to intervene in the process, while only 5 percent used the most powerful lever available: changing the group’s structure.
“The best-designed groups are small teams working interdependently toward clear goals, with motivating tasks and norms that foster psychological safety and autonomy.”
It’s like they say in gambling: The house always wins. In a casino, you can win with a good strategy for a little while. But, in the long run, the odds embedded in the game will win out. It’s the same in teams. Structure is simply more powerful than coaching. It should be the first place you turn when designing a group for synergy.
5. You can shape the groups in your life—even without a title.
In the best groups, leadership isn’t just for whoever has the formal title of leader; it’s a team sport. Every group member can shape group dynamics. When you lack formal authority, you have three main ways to influence your group: asking questions, modeling norms, and attributing leadership to others.
One of the most powerful tools is asking questions. Asking questions about the goals, norms, and processes a group is using can spark important conversations. What are we trying to accomplish here? Why do we do things the way we do them? How can we improve? Questions like these invite overlooked perspectives and help get everyone on the same page.
Early in a group’s life, norms emerge easily. Members look to one another for cues about what’s appropriate. So, modeling norms that promote open communication and psychological safety matters enormously. If you want more candor, show it. If you want curiosity, ask thoughtful questions.
As a group member, you have a choice in who you look to as a role model, turn to for advice, or endorse their suggestions. These are small ways of attributing informal leadership to other members. Over time, informal attributions of leadership can increase the status of other group members, thereby giving them more influence over group dynamics.
Start small. Ask a better question, name an unspoken issue, or model the behavior you want to see. You don’t need permission to improve a group. If you play your cards right, your group can become more than the sum of its parts.
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