This is a book about the creative chemistry that drives innovation in business, science, sport and the arts.

Moreover, it’s about the power of duos and aims to shatter the myth of the lone genius, the idea that world-changing things come from within single minds.

The lone genius idea has become our dominant view of creativity, not because it’s inherently true but because it makes for a good story. It neglects and obscures the social qualities of innovation.

Networks, on the other hand, undoubtedly account for more creativity, but the nuanced nature of the networked model has the opposite effect. It’s hard to find a great narrative there.

Author Joshua Wolf Shenk says that there is a way to understand the social nature of creativity that is both true and useful – the creative pair.

While some pairings are self-evident – think Lennon and McCartney in music or Jobs and Wozniak in a business context – many partnerships are less so. Hidden partners are common, with one stealing the limelight. Sometimes that’s by tacit agreement but not always so.

Prejudice can play a role. Until recently, creative men have taken credit for the labour of their wives, whether as research assistants, editors or even de facto CEOs of companies that bear their husband’s name.

Then there's cases like that of Vivien Thomas, a technician who, alongside Dr Alfred Blalock, pioneered modern heart surgery. Thomas, an African American man, was for several years classified in the hospital payroll as a janitor, even as he ran labs and trained doctors.

One-on-one exchanges

The pair is the primary creative unit, he observes. Studies of creative circles suggest that while groups create a sense of community, purpose and audience, the truly important work gets done in pairs. Why?

For one thing, we’re set up to interact with a single person more openly and deeply than with any group, given that our psyches take shape through one-on-one exchanges with caregivers.

The dyad is the most fluid and flexible of relationships. Add a third person to the mix and you get stability, but creativity gets stifled. Pairs arouse engagement and intensity – neither party can hide.

Dialectic, a word used often in this book, is a fancy term, he concedes, but it really just describes the process by which something singular emerges out of an interaction.

From his extensive research, three archetypes of dyad recur: the star and the director, the liquid and the container, the dreamer and the doer.

The book follows the linear progression of dyads from how they meet to how they subsume themselves into joint identities. We learn how they thrive on distinct and enmeshed roles and how they need to balance closeness with distance, carving out sufficient space to cultivate distinct ideas and experiences in order to give the partnership a frisson.

There’s a dark side to this too. “At the height of their work, pairs operate at the nexus of competition and cooperation, a dialectic that reveals the start nature of power and the potential for conflict,” he writes.

Creative partnership

Partnerships typically end not so much because they lose their spark but because they lose their balance, often due to some critical change in the context around them.

The break-up of The Beatles, and more to the point, the breakdown of the Lennon and McCartney’s creative partnership, proves ample fodder for the author here. That’s a complex story in itself.

The opposite of love is not hate; its indifference, he observes, and this is especially important to consider, given how many pairs may remain nominally together but only as performers and business partners – they may cease to create without any kind of explicit split. Shenk writes elegantly and has composed a fascinating treatise here on an interesting subject.