For most of his life, Shenk understood creativity as being a kind of “immaculate conception”—“rising,” he said, “unbidden from within.” Traditionally, we contrast between the individual and the community, the lone genius and the culture. But it’s all of a piece, said Shenk. If you study the science of social networks, you realize that a human is more like an ant in a colony than a Marlboro Man. We’re shaped by the people around us.

What sorts of people bring out the genius in each other?

Shenk found that many of the pairs he studied were radically similar in many ways—almost like twins—but also possessed some major differences. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple, were both really into technology, loved playing pranks, and had idealistic visions of changing the world. But one was shy, introverted, loved to burrow into projects, and didn’t care about money; the other was wily, charming, and could get people to do almost anything—including things that got in the way of their interests. Great collaboration can’t be canned or engineered, said Shenk. But the best way to find a creative partner is to find commonalities, then look for the person who challenges you the most.

Ames asked Shenk to talk about creative influences; all artists, after all, impersonate and steal from other artists.

Shenk said that everything is derivative, but when we say something is derivative, we mean the originator “shows too much.” The person hasn’t taken the other artist’s work in and made it her own. When it comes to one musician covering another, “I want the person to eat that bread and chew it up and digest it,” said Shenk. He doesn’t want the bread simply held up; if he wanted the original, he’d listen to the original.

Even artists we think of as working in isolation engage with the world and with other people. Emily Dickinson, said Shenk, sent her poems to readers she chose. In fact, scholars of Dickinson argue that it’s incorrect to say she didn’t publish; she may not have printed her poetry, but she chose an audience and reached that audience with her work in her lifetime. And Vincent van Gogh and his brother, Theo, believed they co-created van Gogh’s work.

Shenk said that when you focus on collaboration rather than the lone genius, “you see really vividly that who we are is in relation to others, even when we’re not conscious of it—especially if we’re not conscious of it.”

In the audience question-and-answer session, Shenk was asked what sports might tell us about collaboration.

Athletics, Shenk said, can be a window for looking “at the way that competition and rivalry energize and arouse us and drive us.” We think of collaboration as two people being in a room together, but it’s also about two people being in each other’s heads. Sports stories are usually about either singular heroes or great teams. But these stories are also about great rivalries, like Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. They made each other’s careers—and saved the NBA. This exists in business as well: For many CEOs, their primary creative relationship is with a rival CEO. “That’s where energy and tension come from,” said Shenk. Hatred lives alongside love, affection, and respect.

What role, asked another audience member, do conflicts play in collaboration? Many pairs break up in the end; what does that mean for individual creativity?

“These relationships never actually do end,” said Shenk. Yes, you can look at when a pair did their last piece of work together, but once two people establish a joint identity and “become a we,” they have common creative capital and become part of each other. It’s more binding even than having a child. “I don’t think John Lennon and Paul McCartney could ever separate, and I don’t think Paul McCartney can ever separate from John Lennon’s ghost,” said Shenk.

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One reason my profession is so hard for people to grasp is that the word “collaboration” is a prized piece in the buzzword bingo pile. People use it to mean so many different things that it’s been rendered meaningless. In the early days of my work, I was astute enough to recognize that this was a problem, so I embarked on a little project to figure out what people actually thought it meant.

A common pattern was the belief that “co-” implies that everybody is equal. For some, “collaboration” represented a utopia where everyone contributed equally to and had an equal say in everything. For others, “collaboration” represented a nightmare for exactly the same reasons.

Since first exploring this question, I’ve had the opportunity to work with hundreds of groups of all shapes and sizes, and one thing I’ve learned is that, in the most effective groups, everybody is most certainly not equal. If I were stranded on an island with a pilot, and we came across a plane, I would gladly defer to the pilot as to how to fly it off the island. I don’t have equal knowledge, and treating me as if I did wouldn’t help either of us. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t contribute in useful ways.

Everybody has unique, important strengths. Great work comes from bringing those strengths to the surface and playing to them. A world where everybody is the same would be drab, mediocre, and joyless. Furthermore, if you try to design for a system where people are equal when they’re not, your design will most likely fail.

Why do so many people seem to care whether or not we’re equal? I think it boils down to one simple truth: We want to know that we matter. We want to bring our best selves to our work, and we want to be recognized for the contributions we make. But attempting to quantify those contributions isn’t necessarily useful—and may actually undermine our desire to be recognized.

How could this be the case? It helps to understand what happens when we experience great collaboration—when everybody in a group is contributing his or her best self, and something greater than the sum of the individuals emerges as a result. When a group exhibits those characteristics, we say that it has “chemistry.” The end result is not just an amalgam of the individuals, but a new thing entirely.

In Powers of Two, Joshua Wolf Shenk writes: “The closer two people are, the more they will shed singular pronouns in favor of the plural. It’s not a conscious choice … . It’s simply the way couples begin to think.” Shenk cites psychologist Daniel Wegner’s notion of “transactive memory,” where people cue each other toward a collective memory that no one can recall individually. In a powerful partnership, individuals often can’t remember who contributed what, because their brains have physically recorded “we,” not “you” or “me.”

If partners themselves have trouble distinguishing between “you” and “me,” then why do outsiders think it’s so important to do? It’s because we’re lazy. Shenk points out that people generally attribute co-authored papers to the more famous author, regardless of how much that author actually contributed to the work. (I felt overwashed with guilt when I read this, because I do this all the time.)

In 2011, a group of researchers published a study of a tool out of MIT called Scratch that enabled kids to remix games and animations into their own interactive stories. Many of the people who used the tool were unhappy about not being acknowledged when others remixed their content. Because the tool knew what content was coming from where, Scratch’s creators decided to save people time and manners by having the tool automatically send an acknowledgement to the remixed contents’ originators. The researchers found that this automatic acknowledgement did not appease people’s discontent. It didn’t matter that the tool itself acknowledged people. People wanted conscious acknowledgement from living, breathing human beings.

Groups often approach me with questions about governance. They want to figure out ways to divvy up decision-making (and sometimes compensation) fairly. They often want to start with some philosophical premise (for instance, everyone is equal). I generally advise them to hold off on making structural decisions and figuring out who is contributing what, and instead to focus on general acknowledgement.

The simplest form of this is a ritual of appreciation. It’s something I’ve helped many groups adopt, but my biggest “aha” moment about it came when we realized we weren’t doing this ourselves at my old company. Even thought we thought we already had an appreciative culture, our colleague forced us to spend 30 minutes at a quarterly strategy meeting describing everything we appreciated about one another. We ended up taking an hour. It was enlightening and humbling, like a giant weight being lifted off of our collective shoulders. We ended up making it a regular ritual at all of our strategy meetings.

We all appreciated each other, and we had assumed that everybody already knew this, so we almost never expressed it. We were wrong. That regular act of acknowledgement had a huge impact: It increased overall happiness, and it also raised trust. The funny thing about trust is that, when you have it, issues like governance and who deserves how much credit seem magically to disappear.

We overthink collaboration to our detriment. Empowering every individual and recognizing his or her contributions does not have to mean that everyone is equal, nor that we need to quantify everyone’s relative contributions. Powerful groups develop their own unique identities that, in some ways, subsume their individual participants. In order not to feel lost in those groups, we don’t need to be recognized for our exact contributions. We just need to be recognized—plainly, simply, and authentically.

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There have been a handful of successful creative partnerships like theirs—spectacular ones that earned two people fame and linked their names forever: Marie and Pierre Curie. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

What other sorts of collaborations might have happened? What if brilliant minds and artists throughout history had worked together rather than independently? In advance of Joshua Wolf Shenk’s visit to Zócalo, “Is Collaboration the Secret to Creativity?”, we asked writers: Imagine you have the power to bring together two creative greats (living or dead) to collaborate. Who would you choose and why?

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