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When we're confronting a vexing problem, we often gather a group to brainstorm. We're looking to get the best ideas as quickly as possible. I love seeing it happen—except for one tiny wrinkle. Group brainstorming usually backfires.
In brainstorming meetings, many good ideas are lost— and few are gained. Extensive evidence shows that when we generate ideas together, we fail to maximize collective intelligence. Brainstorming groups fall so far short of their potential that we get more ideas—and better ideas—if we all work alone. As the humorist Dave Barry quipped, "If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be: 'meetings.' " But the problem isn't meetings themselves—it's how we run them.
[...] Collective intelligence begins with individual creativity. But it doesn't end there. Individuals produce a greater volume and variety of novel ideas when they work alone. That means that they come up with more brilliant ideas than groups—but also more terrible ideas than groups. It takes collective judgment to find the signal in the noise and bring the best ideas to fruition.
Source: time.com
From HIDDEN POTENTIAL by Adam Grant
I am sure most of you have spent time "brain storming" ... was it productive or wasted time ?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Wednesday October 25 2023, @10:36PM (2 children)
Gonna stop you there. The problem lies in meetings. We have meetings because the pretense of collaboration is a cornerstone of office culture. The actual function of various office jobs varies, but it's important to fill the empty space with busywork.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Opportunist on Thursday October 26 2023, @08:46AM
The key problem with meetings is the people. Some people exist to have meetings. "I meet, therefore I am" is the creed a lot of very useless people have.
We call them managers. Why, I don't know, because there are useful managers, too, but they usually work and don't start meetings, so they fly under the radar.
Those meetings always run along the same lines. The narcissist drones on for hours and hours while you sit there, mentally undressing the intern that operates the laptop he's too stupid to work himself.
This is also why productivity soared during WFH times. Now you could actually continue working while the narcissist did his droning. This had a few very important synergy effects. Your project was suddenly in time and within budget, because you could use the meeting time sensibly to work on the budget while billing it to the cost center of the narcissist, and the narcissists were incredibly happy because their valuable presentations were suddenly incredibly popular, hell, people from different departments tried to get in to listen to their valuable advice!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday October 26 2023, @10:51AM
There are a few kinds of meetings that are actually useful:
1. Announcement meetings: This is where somebody, usually the boss, has something to tell everyone that's more important than in an email (e.g. the teammate who is not in the room has just been sacked and here's why).
2. Decision meetings: This is where a collective decision has to be reached, and email voting or something like that would take longer than is available, so people need to get together and agree on an answer. In these kinds of meetings, it's vitally important that whoever is presiding is very clear about why the meeting is happening, what question is going to be answered, and afterwords what decision was reached.
3. Teaching meetings: Alice is working on something where Bob knows more about a particular aspect of it, so she wants to get together with Bob to learn what Bob knows. They quickly decide that some other people would benefit from knowing that too, so Bob now gives a presentation on the topic to a room full of people rather than give the same presentation 15 times 1-on-1.
But a lot of pointless meetings get scheduled because (a) management types tend to confuse holding a meeting about a problem with doing something about it, (b) people who don't know how to run meetings letting it lose focus, and (c) people believe, possibly correctly, that talking a lot in meetings, no matter how pointlessly, will lead to professional rewards.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin