Yesterday my friend Bob sent me a pointer to a very interesting article in the New Yorker it was called “Groupthink” by Jonah Lehrer . I took note because a couple of other freinds had called out the same article. I read the abstract and listend to the podcast. I was so intrigued that I bought the online copy of the article.. (I won’t post it here in respect of its copywrite) .. If you like this.. go buy the mag.
here’s the abstract:
ANNALS OF IDEAS about brainstorming and creativity. In the late nineteen-forties, Alex Osborn, a partner of the advertising agency B.B.D.O., decided to write a book in which he shared all of his creative secrets. “Your Creative Power” was filled with a variety of tricks and strategies, but Osborn’s most celebrated idea was the one discussed in Chapter 33, “How to Organize a Squad to Create Ideas.” When a group works together, he wrote, the members should engage in a “brainstorm.” The book outlined the essential rules of a successful brainstorming session. The single most important of these, Osborn said, was the absence of criticism and negative feedback. Brainstorming was an immediate hit and Osborn became a popular business guru. The underlying assumption of brainstorming is that if people are scared of saying the wrong thing, they’ll end up saying nothing at all. Typically, participants leave a brainstorming session proud of their contribution. The whiteboard has been filled with free associations. At such moments, brainstorming can seem like an ideal mental technique, a feel-good way to boost productivity. But there is one overwhelming problem with brainstorming. It doesn’t work. The first empirical test of Osborn’s brainstorming technique was performed at Yale University, in 1958. The results were a sobering refutation of Osborn. Although the findings did nothing to dent brainstorming’s popularity, numerous follow-up studies have come to the same conclusion. And yet Osborn was right about one thing: like it or not, human creativity has increasingly become a group process. Ben Jones, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management, at Northwestern University, has quantified this trend. By analyzing 19.9 million peer-reviewed academic papers and 2.1 million patents from the past fifty years, he has shown that levels of teamwork have increased in more than ninety-five per cent of scientific subfields. Discusses the work of Charlan Nemeth, whose studies suggest that the ineffectiveness of brainstorming stems from the very thing that Osborn thought was most important. “Debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition,” Nemeth said. Discusses Brian Uzzi’s research on collaboration and interaction in the creation of Broadway musicals. Tells about M.I.T.’s Building 20, built in 1943. By the time it was finally demolished, in 1998, Building 20 had become a legend of innovation, widely regarded as one of the most creative spaces in the world. In the postwar decades, scientists working there pioneered a stunning list of breakthroughs, from the development of high-speed photography to the physics behind microwaves. The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right—enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways—the group dynamic will take care of itself.
I also really enjoyed the podcast that the author made in interview .
A couple of key points Lehrer raises
- The long held idea that ‘there are no bad ideas’ during brainstorming does not seem to work . In fact, debate seems to strengthen innovation.
- There seems to be an optimal ‘social intimacy’ for innovation.. Getting lots of people who don’t know each other together is not very effective for the quality of innovation. Neither is getting the same people together to many times. The best outcomes seems to be when you can gather a subset of core people who know each other well and mix in just enough new blood.
- The work environment can also be improved by putting diverse groups in close proximityThe best innovations tend to come from chance encounters, not from deliberate searches for innovation. (the author deals with this more in the podcast than in the article)
- And. (my favorite) .. that a detailed study of scientific innovations showed that face to face contact is one of the most important ingredients of important innovation. The study looked at 35K peer reviewed papers and measured their impact by reference counts. The study showed that the impact of those papers fell of radically with the physical distance between co-authors. The most impactful papers (as measured by reference count) were likely to be by co-authors that sat within a few meters of each other.. the impact fell off quickly with distance from there . I’m a huge believer in the great importance of occasional face to face meetings when doing any sort of innovation. It’s no that innovation is impossible without co-location, it’s just that it’s generally much less effective and much slower.
I love thinking about thinking. And I love the fact that common wisdom is sometimes wrong.. Feel free to dissagree with me.. afterall, I hear it helps !
nite all, nite sam
-me
