A third lesson is constantly to remind yourself of the benefits of tension, which can be easy to forget when all you want is a quiet life. When Samuel Sommers studied jury deliberations, he found that it was the presence of the black jurors that prodded the white jurors into thinking more carefully about the case. De Vaan, Stark and Vedres argue that creative collaboration is all about a sense of dissonance. You don’t just take a nice, neatly packaged idea from a stranger and put it into a fresh context. It is the ill-matched social gears grinding together that produce the creative spark.
