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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the H- Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green.

Today I'm talking with Lee Thompson, professor at Kellogg School of Management and

author of the new book Creative Conspiracy,

The New Rules of Breakthrough Collaboration.

Lee, thanks for talking with us.

Glad to be here.

So your book really tackles some of the sacred cows of creativity using some surprising and

counterintuitive research findings to sort of show us a better way. One of the findings I thought was really

interesting was that distrust actually can increase

creative cognition. In other words a team with a lot of trust might actually be less

creative. Can you explain that for us? Yes, this is based on a relatively new research paper by a couple of researchers at the University of Cologne and what's interesting is that they actually argue that distrust works in two ways.

On the one hand, a distrustful person, a distrustful team member might be very reluctant

to share ideas in social settings because this could have negative

repercussions.

I don't understand or I don't trust your intentions.

Maybe you're going to, you know, use something against me me so I'm going to be very careful

and being careful I'm going to edit and self-censor and then that's going to decrease

creativity. On the other hand what these researchers are arguing is that what happens at a cognitive

...