Q Theory about Creativity and Small World Social Networks (No, not that Q)
Perhaps one of NYC’s best attractions is its Broadway musicals. From dancing cats, movie adaptions, a musical about a founding father, or operative ghost underground, musicals have played a prominent role in popular culture for over a century. And, of course, musicals are a production put on by many people, each with their own role. Even creating a musical requires dozens of creative minds to collaborate. Brian Uzzi, a sociologist at Northwestern, and Jarrett Spiro of Stanford University saw a phenomenon in musical production and wanted to study it. He wanted to figure out how the relationships between the cast and crew affected the success of a production.
In his research of hundreds of musicals from 1945 to 1989, Uzzi and Spiro discovered that much of the musical production work is a social network. A particular play’s actors were likely involved with or had friends in a different show. Crew members who worked on one set probably knew the director of two other performances. Thus, a tightly connected “small world” network was discovered. In this network, Uzzi and Spiro termed the idea of a Q reading – a quantitative measurement of closely a team knew each other in production.
For example, let’s take a five-member team in a minimal production. As they work together, each member forms a bond with the other. Of course, these members likely have worked with other team members, so edges external to this five person’s graph exist, too. We find that 
members are connected to each other, as well as others, creating clusters where certain members have the same members in common, despite the production. Taking this information, Uzzi and Spiro calculated a Q score based on the number of clusters over the average path length between members. The score ranged from 0 to 5, 0 being the crew had no connections to each other, and 5 being that all members had worked together before in the configuration.
So, how does Q score possibly indicate the success of a production? Would a low Q score mean a musical would fail due to unfamiliarity with working together? And vice versa, would a high Q score mean a show would do well as the collaboration would be easier?
As Uzzi and Spiro discovered, the answer was partially intuitive. For low Q scores, less than 1.7, a show would likely fail. This was because the artists didn’t know each other, they likely thought differently and had differing opinions and couldn’t get along well together, either due to opposing opinions or that they were strangers. On the other hand, however, musicals with Q over 3.2 also meant the work performed poorly. As it turns out, teams that were too close would be too similar, stifling innovation.
Indeed, the data showed the most successful shows landed in the middle of the two values, around Q of 2.4 – 2.6. These shows had members who knew each other well enough to work well together, but also new ideas that came together to produce a strong and original production. Low Q meant no cooperation, but too high Q meant too much cooperation, and the lack of strife meant fewer novel ideas.
This so-called “bliss point” meant a show was three times more likely to be a success than those with Q scores less than 1.4 or higher than 3.2. Uzzi believes that “The best Broadway teams, by far, were those with a mix of relationships… [that] had some old friends, but they also had newbies. This mixture meant that the artists could interact efficiently—they had a familiar structure to fall back on—but they also managed to incorporate some new ideas. They were comfortable with each other, but they weren’t too comfortable.” Perhaps the best example of his phenomenon was the 1957 show “West Side Story.” Created by Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, and Arthur Laurents, all legends of their time, meant the show had a lot of talent who had worked together previously. But, the show also had the essential addition of new talent: the “reinventor of the American musical,” in their breakout role, Stephen Sondheim.
Works Referenced
Adkin, David, and Sonia Rebecca Menezes. “Q Theory: What Broadway Musicals Teach Us About Creative Collaboration.” Adalo, https://www.adalo.com/posts/q-theory-what-broadway-musicals-teach-us-about-creative-collaboration. Accessed 27 October 2022.
Uzzi, Brian, and Jarette Spiro. “Collaboration and Creativity: The Small World Problem.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 111, no. 2, 2005, https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/uzzi/ftp/uzzi%27s_research_papers/0900904.pdf.
Uzzi, Brian, and TEDx Talk Northwestern. Teaming Up to Drive Scientific Discovery. 2012. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyjohv6OdoU&feature=emb_logo.