Why good teams beat good ideas

Who discovered the lightbulb? If you answered “Thomas Edison,” you’re not alone—and you’re also not quite right.

Despite conventional wisdom that associates great inventions with lone geniuses, breakthrough inventions are team efforts. Incandescent light bulbs existed before Edison was born. His patent built on prior versions of the light bulb, aiming to make it practical and affordable. Even then, it wasn’t a solo achievement—Edison collaborated with a team of skilled collaborators, known as the “Muckers,” whose contributions have largely faded from memory. Yet it was Edison’s name on the patent, and that’s the version of history that stuck.

We’re suckers for lone genius narratives like Edison’s—the brilliant scientist, the fearless military general, or the savvy CEO. The version of history we glean from popular books, movies, and the internet attributes greatness to single individuals.

But individual greatness is rarely the whole story. Research shows that teams are the main creators of new knowledge across most industries. New ideas don’t emerge fully formed from the mind of a single person—it takes collaboration and teamwork to develop them to their full potential.

In reality, the engine behind sustained success—whether in science, business, or government—isn’t a singular mind. It’s a well-designed team.

The illusion of individual success

We tend to over-attribute both success and failure to individuals. Psychologists call this the fundamental attribution error: we explain people’s behavior by their traits, rather than their context. If a product flops, we blame the CEO. If a startup takes off, the founder is a genius. We rarely ask about the teams that surround them.

It gets worse. Even inside groups, people regularly overestimate their own contributions to collective endeavors. In one study, researchers asked each team member to estimate what percent of the group’s success they were responsible for. The total? A whopping 235%. That’s a lot more than 100%!

Our individualistic tendencies lead us to build groups and organizations around the wrong assumptions. If you believe success comes from star individuals, you hire stars and hope for fireworks. But for complex problems—and most of our work now is complex—it takes more knowledge and skill than any individual has to solve it. That’s why we need to put the conditions in place for individuals to combine and build on what each alone can bring. 

What good teams do differently

In my research, I’ve found that high-performing teams aren’t built through charisma, happy accidents, or trust falls. They’re designed for success. There are four key elements of group structure that maximize your chances of creativity:

• Composition: Many teams are composed haphazardly, based on who’s available and office politics. But the best teams are small (i.e., three to seven members) and have a task-appropriate, diverse mix of knowledge and skills.
• Goals: It’s hard to achieve a common goal when members have different ideas about where they’re headed. That’s why clear, measurable, vivid goals are a critical antecedent for building teams that can outperform individuals. For instance, innovation at NASA spiked when John F. Kennedy swapped the vague goal of, “advance science by exploring the solar system,” to the vivid goal to “put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.”
• Task design: Teams can bring ideas to life when they have well-designed tasks that require a variety of skills, give members autonomy over how to conduct their work, and allow members to see progress toward their goals. For creative work, poorly designed tasks are repetitive and control the process, like a manufacturing assembly line. Well-designed tasks give teams whole pieces of work and the freedom to explore, such as the design firm IDEO’s effort to redesign the shopping cart to better fit the needs of users. 
• Norms: Too often, groups are places where members fall into bad habits. In many organizations, workers are used to sitting passively in meetings. They worry that experimentation and suggesting new ideas will be scorned–or even punished. But the most innovative teams actively fight these norms. Leaders actively encourage members to share their ideas, experiment, and learn from one another. And the battle against norms toward conformity and the status quo never ends. IDEO, for instance, plasters reminders of these norms on the walls of their buildings—things like “defer judgement,” “encourage wild ideas,” and “build on the ideas of others.” 

The real edge

We live in an era that celebrates ideas: TED Talks, startup pitches, visionary founders. But ideas don’t execute themselves. And many great ideas die in bad teams. The reverse is also true: A good team can turn a mediocre idea into something extraordinary. Not because they’re smarter, but because they’re structured to think together better. 

The great innovations and businesses of today were never built by a solitary lone genius. For all the credit Steve Jobs gets, he couldn’t have built Apple and its collaborative innovation engine without the help of his cofounders and teammates. As you dig deeper into stories of great innovations, you almost always find a great team just under the surface.

The next time you’re tempted to credit a lone genius, remember the people behind the curtain. The collaborators, the editors, the dissenters: the ones who made the idea better—or made it real.

Good ideas matter. But good teams matter more.