The answer (in addition to not being overworked) was how many of twenty-two different genres a creator had worked in, from comedy and crime, to fantasy, adult, nonfiction, and sci-fi. Where length of experience did not differentiate creators, breadth of experience did. Broad genre experience made creators better on average and more likely to innovate.
Individual creators started out with lower innovativeness than teams—they were less likely to produce a smash hit—but as their experience broadened they actually surpassed teams: an individual creator who had worked in four or more genres was more innovative than a team whose members had collective experience across the same number of genres. Taylor and Greve suggested that “individuals are capable of more creative integration of diverse experiences than teams are.”
They titled their study Superman or the Fantastic Four? “When seeking innovation in knowledge-based industries,” they wrote, “it is best to find one ‘super’ individual. If no individual with the necessary combination of diverse knowledge is available, one should form a ‘fantastic’ team.” Diverse experience was impactful when created by platoon in teams, and even more impactful when contained within an individual. That finding immediately reminded me of my own favorite comics creators. Japanese comics and animated-film creator Hayao Miyazaki may be best known for the dreamlike epic Spirited Away, which surpassed Titanic as the highest-grossing film ever in Japan, but his comics and animation career before that left almost no genre untouched. He ranged from pure fantasy and fairy tales to historical fiction, sci-fi, slapstick comedy, illustrated historical essays, action-adventure, and much more. Novelist, screenwriter, and comics author Neil Gaiman has a similarly expansive range, from journalism and essays on art to a fiction oeuvre encompassing both stories that can be read to (or by) the youngest readers as well as psychologically complex examinations of identity that have enthralled mainstream adult audiences. Jordan Peele is not a comics creator, but the writer and first-time director of the extraordinarily unique surprise hit Get Out struck a similar note when he credited comedy writing for his skill at timing information reveals in a horror film. “In product development,” Taylor and Greve concluded, “specialization can be costly.”
In kind environments, where the goal is to re-create prior performance with as little deviation as possible, teams of specialists work superbly. Surgical teams work faster and make fewer mistakes as they repeat specific procedures, and specialized surgeons get better outcomes even independent of repetitions. If you need to have surgery, you want a doctor who specializes in the procedure and has done it many times, preferably with the same team, just as you would want Tiger Woods to step in if your life was on the line for a ten-foot putt. They’ve been there, many times, and now have to re-create a well-understood process that they have executed successfully before. The same goes for airline crews. Teams that have experience working together become exceedingly efficient at delegating all of the well-understood tasks required to ensure a smooth flight. When the National Transportation Safety Board analyzed its database of major flight accidents, it found that 73 percent occurred on a flight crew’s first day working together. Like surgeries and putts, the best flight is one in which everything goes according to routines long understood and optimized by everyone involved, with no surprises.
When the path is unclear—a game of Martian tennis—those same routines no longer suffice. “Some tools work fantastically in certain situations, advancing technology in smaller but important ways, and those tools are well known and well practiced,” Andy Ouderkirk told me. “Those same tools will also pull you away from a breakthrough innovation. In fact, they’ll turn a breakthrough innovation into an incremental one.”
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University of Utah professor Abbie Griffin has made it her work to study modern Thomas Edisons—“serial innovators,” she and two colleagues termed them. Their findings about who these people are should sound familiar by now: “high tolerance for ambiguity”; “systems thinkers”; “additional technical knowledge from peripheral domains”; “repurposing what is already available”; “adept at using analogous domains for finding inputs to the invention process”; “ability to connect disparate pieces of information in new ways”; “synthesizing information from many different sources”; “they appear to flit among ideas”; “broad range of interests”; “they read more (and more broadly) than other technologists and have a wider range of outside interests”; “need to learn significantly across multiple domains”; “Serial innovators also need to communicate with various individuals with technical expertise outside of their own domain.” Get the picture?
Charles Darwin “could be considered a professional outsider,” according to creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton. Darwin was not a university faculty member nor a professional scientist at any institution, but he was networked into the scientific community. For a time, he focused narrowly on barnacles, but got so tired of it that he declared, “I am unwilling to spend more time on the subject,” in the introduction to a barnacle monograph. Like the 3M generalists and polymaths, he got bored sticking in one area, so that was that. For his paradigm-shattering work, Darwin’s broad network was crucial. Howard Gruber, a psychologist who studied Darwin’s journals, wrote that Darwin only personally carried out experiments “opportune for experimental attack by a scientific generalist such as he was.” For everything else, he relied on correspondents, Jayshree Seth style. Darwin always juggled multiple projects, what Gruber called his “network of enterprise.” He had at least 231 scientific pen pals who can be grouped roughly into thirteen broad themes based on his interests, from worms to human sexual selection. He peppered them with questions. He cut up their letters to paste pieces of information in his own notebooks, in which “ideas tumble over each other in a seemingly chaotic fashion.” When his chaotic notebooks became too unwieldy, he tore pages out and filed them by themes of inquiry. Just for his own experiments with seeds, he corresponded with geologists, botanists, ornithologists, and conchologists in France, South Africa, the United States, the Azores, Jamaica, and Norway, not to mention a number of amateur naturalists and some gardeners he happened to know. As Gruber wrote, the activities of a creator “may appear, from the outside, as a bewildering miscellany,” but he or she can “map” each activity onto one of the ongoing enterprises. “In some respects,” Gruber concluded, “Charles Darwin’s greatest works represent interpretative compilations of facts first gathered by others.” He was a lateral-thinking integrator.
Toward the end of their book Serial Innovators, Abbie Griffin and her coauthors depart from stoically sharing their data and observations and offer advice to human resources managers. They are concerned that HR policies at mature companies have such well-defined, specialized slots for employees that potential serial innovators will look like “round pegs to the square holes” and get screened out. Their breadth of interests do not neatly fit a rubric. They are “π-shaped people” who dive in and out of multiple specialties. “Look for wide-ranging interests,” they advised. “Look for multiple hobbies and avocations. . . . When the candidate describes his or her work, does he or she tend to focus on the boundaries and the interfaces with other systems?” One serial innovator described his network of enterprise as “a bunch of bobbers hanging in the water that have little thoughts attached to them.” Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda painted the same idea elegantly: “I have a lot of apps open in my brain right now.”