A Collective is a safe place for sharing, discussing, and coming up with insights on each of its members’ creative journey. To allow that, we recommend forming a Collective which is small, stable, and diverse.
Size
To be effective, a Collective should include a limited number of members committed to taking the journey together. The minimal number of members is two, and we recommend not forming a Collective with more than 10 people to allow effective sharing and discussion. With more than 10 participants, any discussion might become too long or will not allow all members to express themselves.
You can form a Collective of friends, colleagues, or family members. You can turn your team into a Collective and promote not only personal Creativity but also the Creativity of the group as a whole.
Stability
The Collective should be stable as much as possible throughout the journey. If a different subset of people attends each session, sharing might become awkward, and the natural flow of the group will be impacted.
In any case, a Collective should not be managed as an open group in which new members can just show up. If you are using an online platform for managing the Collective meetings, we advise making sure the group is closed. The purpose of a Collective is not to be a platform for open meetups.
Diversity
The more diverse the Collective is, the more surprising the joint journey will become. Diversity is an invitation for different ingredients, perspectives, insights, and ideas — the stuff that fuels Creativity.
If you can affect the Collective formation, aim to invite people from diverse backgrounds, professions, cultures, ages, etc. There are infinite dimensions for diversity, and the more you utilize them, the more influential the Collective will be.
There are cases where the level of diversity is dictated by the nature of the group. In such cases, encourage the Collective members to express as much of themselves and their own uniqueness as possible. For example, if the Collective is your organizational team, you obviously cannot hand-pick its members. However, you can and should encourage the members to bring challenges, insights, and dilemmas from their own personal life and experience (instead of just discussing issues relating to the team’s work). Use this opportunity to surface and utilize diversity even if it is not apparent at first.