Edison was genius, but not a lone genius. Sarah Caldicott documented that team work in the book Midnight Lunch: The 4 Phases of Team Collaboration Success from Thomas Edison’s Lab. I asked her about those 4 phases in a past podcast.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Teamwork: The Edison Way
An excerpt from the podcast:
Joseph: The subtitled of the book talks about the 4 phases, now is that something that you just synthesized or were they terms that Edison used and you went ahead and put in the book?
Sarah: That’s a great question. Edison actually didn’t really codify his process in a way that we might do today. He certainly made all kinds of notes – we have literally hundreds and thousands of pages of documentation in his notebooks, so we can go back and reconstruct what he was doing. But I think what’s interesting is just finding the patterns, finding the things that he was doing over and over again and synthesizing those things so that we can apply them today. That’s really where ‘Midnight Lunch’ comes in with the 4 phases. I really sort of put those terms together. I talk about it as 4 phases; it wasn’t really something Edison himself noted in any of his work. It’s really a pattern that I’ve kind-of put together just looking back in time.
Joseph: Can you name the 4 phases for people that are just listening to the podcast?
Sarah: The first phase has to do with capacity. Capacity has an extremely important component of the collaboration process because it’s where we establish the foundation for what collaboration is, and also how to engage it – how to actually get people to collaborate. The second phase, I call context. This is a time during which the team comes together and actually creates dialogue and begins to shape their thinking around a challenge or a problem, and asks questions. That’s one of the most important things about collaboration. The third phase, I call coherence. This is really where we start to look at how does a team stay together? What are the qualities that keep team members engaged and really giving their best stuff? And the fourth phase, I call complexity. Certainly we’re all dealing with tremendous complexity today in an era of smart devices, very fast moving business environments.
Complexity was also something quite familiar with Edison. He lived during a time when infrastructure was changing dramatically; in fact 1880 to 1920 is the most prolific era of American innovation to-date. So lots were happening in Edison’s time, and he became very adept at organizing for complexity. So this is how we see some of his collaborations being created. So those are the 4 phases.
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