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154 Creativity

tend to spend more time rehearsing shared information, that is, information
that each group member already knows, than pooling the unique – unshared –
pieces of information that each individual brings to the joint effort. Larson’s
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explanation is simple: For a concept to become a topic of conversation, some-
body has to mention it, which in turn means that they must think of it. The
probability that a concept is retrieved, thought of and mentioned is higher,
the more group members know of it. The pieces of knowledge that have the
highest probability of being talked about are therefore those that everybody
already knows. Larson’s studies show that as discussion continues, a group
might exhaust their shared information and move onto unshared information.
The creative power of groups might not be realized unless the members keep
interacting for some time.
Common sense suggests other sources of process loss. The sheer difficulty
of understanding what a speaker is saying about a difficult topic or problem
might blunt the possibility of his jolting the other team members out of their
mental ruts. Furthermore, the most helpful and relevant communications tend
to be few and far between, embedded in streams of information in which most
items are neither. Attending to communications takes time and effort, and the
balance between resource drain and utility can be negative. When everybody
receives 300 e-mail messages a day, nobody will have time to create anything.
The main effect of process loss is to negate the potential advantage of diverse
backgrounds in preempting collective impasses.
Siddharta Bhattacharyya and I explored communication effects in a sim-
ulation model of a creative collective. We used a computational technique
known as agent-based modeling to create a collective of simple, simulated cog-
nitive agents who all worked on the same problem and communicated partial
results along the way. The question of interest was which factors determined
the rate at which the model reached the solution to the shared task. The model
demonstrated clearly that increasing the number of communication links
among capacity-limited cognitive agents causes process loss. The result of one
such simulation run is shown in Figure 5.5.
Further out along the collectivity dimension, the formal structure of a
large organization can cause impasses. The operative knowledge of a collective
is not always exhaustively defined by the sum of the beliefs of the participating
individuals. Organizations have a formal structure and, typically, a center of
authority. The knowledge of an organization includes pronouncements and
policies by leaders and authorities. The point of view of the chief executive
officer (CEO) impacts the search space of a firm’s research and development
team, the battle plan of a commanding officer constrains the tactics of his