A great conversation started on a private mailing list shared by my classmates. It was sparked by a piece in yesterday’s Times: The Rise of the New Groupthink.
In his email, K criticized the idea that innovative thinking could be efficiently mastered by groups. He’s, of course, right. But “innovative thinking” isn’t a thing you can schedule a 90-minute meeting for; it’s a longer process.
What groups are good for is overcoming the limitations of our own individual ways of thinking. There are some problems that I can’t fully understand or attempt to solve without working with others.
One of the things I’m happy to have learned about in the SFI program is complexity. And here’s my theory about the relationship between collaboration and complexity: all of the easy problems — the ones which can be fully conceived by a single person — have already been solved. Complex problems are (to generalize) too big to be adequately understood by a single person. They’re far more difficult to solve, because doing so demands effective communication between two or more people.
I don’t think anyone credible is (as K suggested) trying to “transfer the innovation spark from the individual to the group.” What some are trying to do is figure out how to facilitate the conditions for a group of people to be able to effectively tackle the problems that are too big for anyone to figure out alone.
For small problems: you’d be foolish to ask a group to do a job when a single (adequately-equipped) person could handle it. In contexts like that in the SFI program, I think this point needs to be made more clearly.
My takeaway from the Times piece isn’t that the world is finally cluing into that group work is a sham. It’s mostly just a reminder that introverts often prefer to work alone, and that they sometimes come up with some swell stuff.
I don’t know why working collaboratively is hipper these days than working in solitude, but it might partially be because lots of people are starting to use new tools which make interpersonal communication faster and cheaper. The existence of these makes possible new ways of working; in particular, they’re enablers of collaboration. It’ll take us a while to figure out how to design and use them most effectively, but — buried in the baby photos on Facebook and the mountains of hashtags — there’s a big step forward.
I also agree strongly with the point that M made in the email thread, that group brainstorming is effective with people who have a strong sense of self. And that achieving a (non-dickish) strong sense of self among students would be a worthy project for educators.
The importance of quiet, or solitude, or unplugging to my own creative process is something I’ve been thinking about for years. Some others are interested in the same things, and here are a few that stand out:
- Jason Fried’s TED talk, Why Work Doesn’t Happen At Work
- Ben Fullerton’s IXDA talk, Designing for Solitude
- The Wisdom 2.0 conference
- The U-Process: as described by Adam Kahane in his books Solving Tough Problems and Power & Love (featuring meditation as a critical component of a future-oriented collaboration
methodology!)
