Creative Collaboration

“To do something creative you have got to believe in the superior genius of a group of people. The intergroup learning will compensate for any weakness you believe you have.”

When you spend time around Joe Rohde, legendary Disney Imagineer, you quickly realize how differently his mind works. I first met Joe about five years ago when Djuan Rivers and I spent the day at his house. I remember thinking his brain was like a museum, national park, encyclopedia and zoo all rolled into one. His curiosity seems to take him everywhere.

That made a recent conversation with Joe and Bob Weis about creative collaboration especially interesting. Joe’s new book, Floating Mountains, explores his design philosophies and decades of creative work. Yet one of his central ideas challenges the way we often talk about creativity. We tend to celebrate individual genius. However, Joe believes we should pay more attention to the genius of the group.

While working with Disney Imagineering, his role wasn’t to tell everyone exactly what to do. He described leadership as setting a clear direction while leaving enough room for people to contribute their own ideas. If the direction is clear, people shouldn’t have to keep checking whether they’re doing it right.

That freedom matters because collaboration doesn’t simply help execute an idea. It changes the idea. Joe explained that many of the projects associated with him would have been something entirely different without the contributions of the people around him. His job was to make the direction clear enough that talented people could bring something unexpected to it.

His advice for young creative people follows the same philosophy: find people.

Find people you can work with, learn from and share challenges with. Your individual weaknesses become less important when you’re surrounded by people whose strengths complement your own.

Creativity may begin with an individual thought, but some of the most interesting ideas become possible when we stop trying to create them alone.