Colin M. Fisher is a scholar, author, and teacher of team leadership, creativity, and improvisation. As an Associate Professor of Organisations and Innovation at University College London, Colin teaches executives, graduate students, and undergraduates about leading teams that foster creativity, learning, and effective decision-making.
In his work as a professional jazz trumpet player, Colin was a long-time member of the Grammy-nominated Either/Orchestra, with whom he toured the U.S., Europe, and Africa and recorded several critically acclaimed albums.
Group (Re)Think: How Being Together Shapes Our Lives
The first trade book in fifty years to take a deep dive into group dynamics, Group Think will revolutionise our approach to the groups to which we belong – be they our family, our work, our nation, or our yoga class. Like Four Thousand Weeks or Grit, Colin M. Fisher shows us a fresh approach to our everyday lives.
Ask the name of the villain in J.K Rowling’s tale of adolescent wizard Harry Potter, and almost everyone will answer: “Lord Voldemort.” But, as a social scientist, and perhaps the world-expert on group dynamics, Dr. Colin M. Fisher sees a far more pernicious villain in the Harry Potter saga: the Sorting Hat. Separating the brave from the brainy, the loyal from the devious, it is the Sorting Hat’s sinister grouping that draws the dividing lines for the wars which bookend Rowling’s novels.
The Sorting Hat can remain a hidden villain because it seems so familiar in our world. We have no need of magical headwear to sort people into groups, because our brains do it for us: we carry our own personal sorting hats with us wherever we go.
Our membership in ever-shifting, overlapping groups changes how we think, feel, and behave. We behave differently among different people because of how we perceive our fit within each group.
Taken to extremes, the distorted lens that our inner sorting hat provides underlies humanity’s greatest evils and accomplishments. But the social glue that having being part of a group provides also allows us to cooperate, even in the direst of circumstances.
Group dynamics is more than making better decisions at work or leading teams—it is foundational to the human experience. At both the macro and micro level, and everywhere in between—from the nation-state or the work meeting, to the religion we follow or the family barbeque—group dynamics is at play. By understanding it better, so too can we better understand ourselves.