Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation | Hacker News Reader

Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation

nature.com

140 pointshammock60 comments

Last I checked, there were studies like https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221... that touted the importance of (solitary) individual time for idea generation. And the virtual communication enhanced idea selection. So the only lesson I get from this is that continuous virtual communication is overdoing it, but that a mix of virtual and alone time is probably better than all the stupid in-person meetings.

My take is that it's the same lesson we've already known. You need time alone to brainstorm independently, and you need to be more in-person to use those ideas as a team to be creative.

But the main takeaway is that everyone should consider every meeting. Is it necessary. Should it be virtual or in person. IS IT NECESSARY.

But, again, I feel like that's always been a thing.

I think what we learn from this study is that scientists are great at showing their hypotheses to be true, no matter what they may be. So if two groups have opposing hypotheses, both still get published, the differences only show up in the raw data, and the nuisances are then explained away in the discussion. If it has to do with something as flimsy as behavior, you should put very little trust in the conclusions.

There of course could be all sorts of clever statistical explanations for two experiments coming up with conflicting results, but a simpler explanation seems to be that these two hypotheses aren't in direct opposition.

The abstract of the first says:

> Our results suggest that virtual interaction comes with a cognitive cost for creative idea generation.

and the abstract of the second says

> Three experiments were designed to test the efficacy of ideation procedures that involved alternation of individual and group idea generation sessions (hybrid brainstorming) as compared to traditional individual and group ideation. [...] The results of the experiments support the original suggestion by Osborn (1953) that the most effective brainstorming process is one that involves a variation in individual and group ideation.

This all seems to fit what common sense would have us believe, right? A mix of alone and group time helps, virtual group time isn't a perfect replacement for in-person group time for some tasks.

Not only alone, but disconnected. My brain is seriously altered by the presence of an active and unlimited internet connection.

> Our data suggest that this physical difference in shared space compels virtual communicators to narrow their visual field by concentrating on the screen and filtering out peripheral visual stimuli that are not visible or relevant to their partner.

Yeah... how about creative idea generation gets written down somehow and expanded? I've yet to find in my life, a worthwhile creative idea, that can't be written down for dissemination and expansion. What I have found is snake oil peddlers that like to hear themselves speak and throw around 'creative' ideas that get lost in a sea of dialogue.

> Here we show that virtual interaction uniquely hinders idea generation—we find that videoconferencing groups generate fewer creative ideas than in-person groups due to narrowed visual focus, but we find no evidence that videoconferencing groups are less effective when it comes to idea selection.

I don't disagree with the results of this paper, but I disagree with the premise that creative idea generation is something that should get done in a physical huddle.

In my experience the best ideas come about when a group of competent people each go off on their own and think deeply about a problem, then talk to each other afterwards about what ideas they have. Often good ideas, particularly to complex problems, come about as fusion of a couple good idea-lets.

>Often good ideas, particularly to complex problems, come about as fusion of a couple good idea-lets.

This has been the case in my experience as a researcher. My collaborators and I tend to have various seeds of ideas that aren't much more than just "it could be interesting to look at X." But when we sit down at a bar to shoot the shit around some drinks, that's when those ideas combine into something really promising, and we feed off each other's excitement. Hard to have that in a virtual setting.

> What I have found is snake oil peddlers that like to hear themselves speak and throw around 'creative' ideas that get lost in a sea of dialogue.

What’s the real story here? Why characterize them as “snake oil peddlers who like to hear themselves speak?”

Anyone who makes a creative attempt to improve the workplace gets a gold star in my book.

Negativity is contagious, and I wouldn’t want an underminer on my team who characterizes other peoples’ ideas as “snake oil.”

> What’s the real story here? Why characterize them as “snake oil peddlers who like to hear themselves speak?”

I’ve worked in government, academia and private. I’ve been an IC, a CTO and general manager. I’ve never heard a truly creative idea result from a huddle, usually it’s what other commenters say in that someone comes with a well thought of creative idea that gets thrown around in the huddle, but never as a source of a truly creative idea. That’s my n=1 and that’s the real story.

> Negativity is contagious, and I wouldn’t want an underminer on my team who characterizes other peoples’ ideas as “snake oil.”

I guess we’re both lucky in this sense that chances are we won’t end up working together so I can infect with my negativity.

For myself I know how I prefer novel / creative ideas to get presented, disseminated and discussed, I like to think I reward those properly and encourage them, at the same time reducing the amount of bullshit snake oil. I can’t do that without acknowledging the situations that cause these time wasters.

  "when it comes to selecting which idea to pursue, we find no evidence that videoconferencing groups are less effective (and preliminary evidence that they may be more effective)"

Personally I've rarely seen really good ideas actually generated in a meeting, they are usually brought in by people having a revelation at the coffee machine or whatever, and then chosen, possibly refined in meeting.

So in fact, contrary to the headline, remote could be the ideal; people bring in ideas from their much more diverse experiences working remotely, and a video conference is a better way of selecting which idea to pursue.

This does seem to imply a new heuristic - ideate in-person, but make decisions over tele-conference.

It will be interesting to see what telepresence tech can do to overcome the screen-dependence issues of modern remote work for creative work.

> This does seem to imply a new heuristic - ideate in-person, but make decisions over tele-conference.

This is more or less consciously what we ended up doing in remote-first companies I've worked at. Work remotely, but gather twice a year for at least a week to reflect, bond and gather/develop the ideas we'd take into the next interval. At one of them we did this for close to a decade, with 20-30 people living all over the planet. I'd say overall this works, and certainly has generated a string of fond memories ("do you remember the one when we came up with ...") for many involved as well. The point of coming together is not so much to get intense work done, and more to discuss and make plans and see what happens.

It's also how we roll in the KDE open source community with the annual conf and the irregular sprints and project-specific gatherings.

At my current company, we were 200 in a building designed for 250 at the start of the pandemic - and now we're up to 800 people, still with the same building. We effectively ended up remote-first by logistical necessity, but we use the office for workshops and some cross-functional meetings (we're also building a large new campus for thousands, though).

Virtual interactions are tied to screens. That's their weak point, because screens affect our vision, how we move and focus our eyes.

Our eyes are the only part of our brain exposed to light and air. It turns out that how we move and focus them affects the rest of brain function.

Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist at Stanford, has researched and spoken about this deeply and at length. Here are three podcast episodes where he dives in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObtW353d5i0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqCEOJSvgwA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze2pc6NwsHQ

I think all three points in these comments can be right: 1) we need alone time; 2) sharing physical space can help creativity; 3) virtual meetings can hurt it.

But we have to isolate the variables. Shared physical space for creative sessions doesn't have to mean open offices, and it doesn't have to mean eliminating solitude. We should also allow for different people responding differently to virtual meetings, shared space, etc, and remember to consider this statistically, as the scientists do. That is, we should try to segment the subjects of the study. Some will prefer screens more, some shared space.

The tech industry remains willfully and obtusely ignorant of the costs of virtualizing human interaction, because people sitting in a room together don't need much software, and nobody's going to build a unicorn on that.

As with long covid, the true and persistent costs of these changes -- virtualizing everything -- will only become apparent in the years to come.

Virtual interactions aren't tied to screens. That's the first thing people need to stop associating.

Gamers have done this stuff without wasting screen estate for decades. It's the office culture which tries to push video both ways, which creates a vastly different dynamic. It's crazy how researchers largely ignore these subcultures doing just fine.

Those gamers are still tied to screens.

True. But the focus is entirely different. Gamers interact while engaged in a task: the task is the focus, and communication happens through speech or text. Playing a game and communicating via Discord is a pleasure. Contrast that with a meeting on Zoom or Teams, and the focus shifts. If the screen is filled with little videos of other people, it's mentally exhausting in a way gaming isn't.

I think online meetings I had 10 years ago, where we'd share a desktop but it was voice-only for all participants, were easier on everyone than the current Hollywood Squares presentation of most online meeting applications. Those are mentally and emotionally taxing in ways that gaming is not.

Our experience is that after 2+ years of working mostly remotely, that very few people use web cams in meetings, and then only for the initial introduction. Apart from giving ammunition to laugh at somebodies 5 day beard, it is completely unnecessary.

We do however spend many hours a day in audio chat, sharing screens discussing technical issues and possible solutions.

This is a vast contrast to how we used to collaborate before Covid, where we'd have long in person meetings, where most of the people in the room drifted off watching the birds out the window whilst a couple of egos would speak to what ever they through was important.

There seems to be an belief, especially in the VR world, that body language, even eye movement is what you have meetings for. This may be important in some domains, maybe sales, but for technical meetings, I don't need to see your eyes, I need to see your ideas... Lets face it, it's a meeting, not a date.

Glad you noticed. Now extrapolate to other activities which are not tied to screens, such as... virtual conversation. We've actually done this for decades too: telephones. Radio. Etc.

The joke here is, gamers are less tied to the screen than most video call participants feel or even are. That while one requires near-constant focus on the screen, and the other doesn't.

"I do basically no videoconferencing. Screensharing is great, and critical. But typically I find video distracting." – Stephen Wolfram (https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod...)

Phone calls barely merit the name "virtual interactions."

But in any case, when people are working remotely, the vast majority are using audio while they look at a screen, which underscores my point.

Unpopular opinion: for innovation and creation which requires collaborative team work - especially in early stages of a project/product - nothing better than being together collocated, but once you’re in execution mode (requirements finalized, now build) much better to be at home. I can’t stand having to transport to the office, but once I’m there there is nothing better

Couldn’t agree more. There really is something unique about being in a room with a big white board, a few tough problems to solve, and lunch on the table. I’ve done my best work in those situations and I’m looking forward to when my job looks like that again.

Interestingly, this matches what Bjorn Freeman-Benson said in 2019, before the pandemic. He's a CTO with a lot of experience with remote development:

> Due to communication friction, “we got much less creativity out of our [distributed teams] at InVision,” Bjorn said. “We had to overstaff to get the same amount of creativity. In other words, if communication was 80% as effective, we’d have to hire 30% more people.” Communication friction didn’t necessarily affect productivity, but it did affect creativity. And in InVision’s startup environment, creativity was key.

He calls it "The Friction of Communication Problem." There's more in the article:

https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/blog/2019/three-challenges-of-...

Let's skip straight to the actual data:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04643-y/tables/2

The way I see it, even if this data isn't just noise, the difference is negligible. Moreover, generating slightly more ideas isn't necessarily valuable. Most ideas are worthless distractions. Curiously, some of the data suggests that the virtual team picked the better ideas, but again, the difference is negligible.

yea, that's how I read it too. Those standard deviations are pretty wide.

It seems they have sufficient data points that the difference in the means is significant even with high variance. For example, take "number of creative ideas" because it has the largest Cohen's d besides the gaze measurements. Doing Welch's t-test to compare and assuming the virtual/physical were evenly split (not reported), the statistic is (14.74-16.77) / sqrt(6.23^2/150 + 7.27^2/150)=2.6 and at 75 degrees of freedom that's something like p=0.03, still pretty significant. In the paper they use a negative binomial distribution because the distributions are significantly non-normal and get a lower p=0.002. Then in the field studies with 745 more pairs they get pretty much the same results. So overall the statistics seem fine and they probably found a replicable effect.

The more likely issue is garbage in, garbage out - their study design is really not that great, e.g. the time taken to switch between the screen and the tablet could be the cause of the difference.

I'll be honest in my experience a good idea comes from an individual who has an insight or sees a vision others can't.

I've noticed these ideas can get refined and filtered by group discussion and can go from good to great, but for me at least personally I don't feel like I can come up with good thought out ideas without spending extra time to think through them and understand them.

Linux of course suffers as a purely virtually developed software product a profound lack of creativity apparently.

Linux is not purely virtual, it is distributed. Many hardware companies employ kernel dev teams. There are multiple venues to sync-up across dev teams to brainstorm new ideas in kernel development.

it was most certainly not virtually developed while becoming relevant. if you want to build your house getting inspiration from burj dubai, go for it.

Study is full of easily poked at holes.

Pairs were assigned at random and the study was short. That alone could create bias in favor of in-person. It also ignores many real life settings not working in pairs, but larger groups at dedicated moments while stuffed with solo work otherwise (retrospectives and sprint planning say hi).

Pairs interacted with a single 15 inch screen. I mean, come on.

Focus was primarily on video, then extrapolates to the entirety of virtual (audio-only exists too).

>By contrast, we found preliminary evidence that decision quality was positively impacted by virtual interaction. In-person teams had a significantly higher top-scoring idea in their generated idea pool

This seems far more important than it's given space for, too. What good is quantity in the face of quality and bias?

Disclaimer: I do personally believe in-person to have more potential, but this ain't it chief.

In other news, Nature would like you to return to work where you'll be so creative under the florescent lights in your super-cubicles and open floor plans.

I am careful to use the term “Return to long commutes and work from the office” as “return to work” implies that working remotely is not “work”.

I believe you meant the former - this is my tiny PSA about the importance of framing and phrasing.

Similarly “quiet quitting” is a frame further normalizing employee exploitation. “Working within contractual obligations” defangs that one.

I do the same thing, but insist on calling all regular weekends "short weekends" and holiday weekends "regular weekends" or just "weekends". My hope is this catches on and we start thinking of 5 day weeks as "long weeks". (given that I stole this from a podcast producer maybe it already is?)

the "big office real estate conspiracy" is in full swing... So many articles shilling for going back, but the genie is out of the bottle now.

> Publisher of Nature (journal) - Nature Research (subsidiary of Springer Nature)

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> Springer Nature - Owners: Holtzbrinck Publishing Group (53%), BC Partners (47%)

> In 2017, the company agreed to block access to hundreds of articles on its Chinese site, cutting off access to articles on Tibet, Taiwan, and China's political elite.

---

> Holtzbrinck Publishing Group is a privately held German company based in Stuttgart which owns publishing companies worldwide. ..The history of Georg von Holtzbrink's publishing activities during the Nazi years 1933-1945 has been controversial. ..In 2015, it merged most of its Macmillan Science and Education unit (including Nature Publishing Group) with Springer Science+Business Media.

---

> BC Partners is a British international investment firm with over $40 billion of assets under management across private equity, credit and real estate in Europe and North America.

Another possibility is this is a Meta marketing effort because in the Metaverse you aren't looking at a screen so, ah, you can be creative? Seems like a rational explanation.

>By contrast, we found indications that virtual interaction might increase decision quality.

>Virtual pairs selected a significantly higher scoring idea (M = 4.28, s.d. = 0.81) and had a significantly lower decision error score (M = 0.78, s.d. = 0.67) compared with in-person pairs

works for me.

Ah yes, let's arm middle management and corporate executives who already barely go into any office themselves with more propaganda for them to present as half baked evidence that everyone should be back in office.

The experiment is interesting, but the interpretive claims made in this article extrapolate well beyond what the evidence actually shows. It reads like a mediocre university press release about the research, except it's the actual research article itself that is making uncritical, overgeneralized claims about what it showed.

My comments on the abstract:

> we show that videoconferencing inhibits the production of creative ideas.

No. At most you showed that people doing videoconferencing in 2022 have less creative ideas on average than people in a shared physical space in 2022. You didn't show that videoconferencing is the unconditional, eternal, inherent, invariant cause of this.

> we demonstrate that videoconferencing hampers idea generation because it focuses communicators on a screen, which prompts a narrower cognitive focus.

No. At most you showed that communicators using videoconferencing in 2022 focus more on a screen, which prompts a narrower cognitive focus. Why do the communicators do that? Did the videoconferencing force them to focus on the screen? You didn't demonstrate that, and it's probably not true.

Maybe we have bad social norms around how videoconferencing is used because we have not had sufficient time to develop and spread best practices. Maybe we feel obligated to sit very still and stare at each other's faces, when we could instead have a shared norm that it's OK to stop doing that and focus on our tasks while on the call. Maybe we should feel free to turn the camera off from time to time (Slack huddles default to video off, a gutsy and visionary choice). Maybe we should feel free to pace around the room, like some of us might do in a physical space. Maybe we need to set each other free to be humans when speaking to each other virtually, rather than reducing each other to motionless bodies that exist to present stationary faces on a screen.

We need to look at the interaction between the technology and our social norms before we jump to the conclusion that some aluminum and silicon forces us to behave in certain ways and that we are helpless to do otherwise.

If you had to guess, what kills human creativity? An inanimate object made of metal and glass that makes pictures and sounds if you ask it to... or social pressure -- which could be explicit and external or implicit and internalized -- to conform to behaviors that kill creativity?

Good points. I find myself wondering whether everyone was equally affected. I don't always stare at the screen during video calls. I do when I'm trying to communicate, but when I'm thinking I do what I do in person - I stare off into space. I think this is fairly common. Looking at a person's face, you are getting all kinds of information, even when they aren't speaking. When people are concentrating, I think they often look at their notes, at the ceiling, out the window. The problem may simply be that some people don't understand that's ok in a videoconference format.

Actually, one thing I have found has benefit is switching to async idea generation.

The power of a group chat where people discuss ideas as they occur is really powerful.

Many times in an in-person whiteboard session, you may not fully explore the ideas or people who are not comfortable jumping in get ignored.

An async idea generation session often sees a wide variety of ideas explored as well as more in-depth exploration as people can think about ideas more and cross reference sources. In addition, it is easier for someone who may be more introverted to put out their ideas.

Also this takes advantage of the just got an idea in the shower or while doing a long run phenomenon.

As others have said, the researchers got close but missed the mark here.

If you're trying to innovate while staring someone down on a video call, you're doing it wrong. Get a white boarding app. They're better than real world whiteboards in many ways, although not as great in others.

I'd love to see a follow up study with proper screen sharing environments.

idea generation being measured as an output of 2 strangers brainstorming on a random product seems too distant from the scenario in which most creative ideas are actually created.

my experience in real-world enviros:

+ no single variable is dominant across all

+ trust can be important and often is easier to build in-person

+ pairs or teams with trust can innovate over any medium

+ a degree of randomness can be helpful and feels underrated to me. it can help us see through blind spots, assumptions, or biases which we didn't realize we had by taking a conversation to a place in which we may not have otherwise taken it, or making us think through a problem in a different way. this randomness can come from many places, including 'outsiders' (experts in other domains is great, but so are newbies)

My team noticed this during lockdown, we make a point to do all creative discussion IRL now.

You could have a video conference while outside in nature. Or you could be traveling to a different country. Most book authors work "remote" which is creative.

they don't work remote, because they work alone

> we demonstrate that videoconferencing hampers idea generation because it focuses communicators on a screen, which prompts a narrower cognitive focus.

I wonder what including virtual reality in the study would have resulted in. I feel like being surrounded by a shared environment, and (in the near future) seeing facial expression and gaze tracking might make VR a better environment for idea generation.

Judging from the abstract, the title should be actually be

"Videoconferencing curbs creative idea generation".

There's more to virtual communication.

I've found most experienced teleworkers like myself rarely use video conferencing for remote work. When I need to work on a creative idea it's much easier to grab the phone, put earbuds on, and sit in the garden to walk and think, or take a walk in the street, or get myself in whatever comfortable position. If there's anything to share it will most likely be a screen with code or text, which is functionally the same as sitting with someone side by side except with all the personal space you can't get otherwise.

This has been my experience and I don’t understand it. Technically speaking you have the same capabilities on a zoom call - you can see their face, talk to them, use a virtual whiteboard, etc.

But by the end of it you just feel spent, and the creative energy just isn’t the same as being physically present.

> Technically speaking you have the same capabilities on a zoom call - you can see their face, talk to them, use a virtual whiteboard, etc.

Technically speaking, you don't. Physical whiteboards are much more efficient in quickly scribbling your thoughts for everyone to see than a virtual whiteboard driven by keyboard and mouse.

This is just middle management and landlord propaganda porn. I have never been as creative when I'm not being disturbed by office noise and gossiping office mates.

100%

Well, this paper will be a rallying point for every RTO manager out there.

And Meta will end up using as a tool to promote metaverse interactions.

Probably the article's entire reason for existing.

> we instructed each pair to generate creative uses for a product for five minutes and then spend one minute selecting their most creative idea.

This is published in Nature, why? it's a very narrow definition of "creativeness" . Such claims have a mountain to climb. Scientists have been doing remote work for decades, it's not like all the creative stuff happened in attention-deprived conferences.

Who could benefit?

Popular "debate" in the news cycle, scientific authority based on crude subjective judgment, interests of capital.

This sort of viral bad science is something you would expect from reddit but not from hackernews. I suspect this site is becoming more like the former.

To be clear, I'm not making claims on whether or not remote work is more or less creative.

Just highlighting the point that bad science that fits a certain popular trend in online media gets clicks and engagement.

Comments like yours get little to no engagement because it actually addresses the article and is not an empty anecdotal debate for entertainment.

What makes this site intellectually engaging is that it is text-focused and doesn't host porn. It is much better at being what reddit wanted to be, but I think it it is "crossing the chasm" which is a term I learned here.

I think it is time to log off for good and get back to work. This sort of thing enough of a reason. Do not want to waste life scrolling.

Doesn't pass the smell test.

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