The Rise of the New Groupthink (2012)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
As an entrepreneur, I have no problem whatsoever in working with geniuses who need to be alone to exercise their genius. Sure, they need to be able to have some kind of contact,, and to collaborate, with others, even if on a limited basis. (Even Picasso had to deal with models, agents, and art dealers.) But letting such individuals work on very long leashes helps everyone, and furthers the work of the organization.
She didn't get it when I asked where the long distance runner fit in.
I was in a R&D group for the company and I was tasked with leading a small team to prototype some innovative ways to collaborate. We were coming up very short.
I went into the bathroom and locked myself in a stall for 45 minutes, because that's the only place I could find with zero people for awhile.
And in that solitude some ideas finally started to percolate. I finally had that lightbulb moment. I ended up getting a patent on the very thing I came up with that day in the bathroom stall. http://www.google.com/patents/US20040183829 (Of course a lot of BS in this patent, but it was pretty novel at the time.)
I don't think it's any surprise why we get so many great ideas in the shower. It's because we're finally alone.
Take anything anyone claims to tells you about yourself with a grain of salt, of course, but I found it interesting.
> But decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases. The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups,” wrote the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham. “If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”
> The reasons brainstorming fails are instructive for other forms of group work, too. People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that when we take a stance different from the group’s, we activate the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the fear of rejection. Professor Berns calls this “the pain of independence.”
I feel like productivity and creativity are both absolutely possible in a team setting, just as much as they are in solitude. The determining factor is the competency of the team. My side-project team is outstanding, and we build amazingly with each other, because we're a good team. But at work I dread team-work because my management team members are dolts. But I digress -- I don't think it's the group/alone devide. It's a divide on the quality of the people.
Essentially: the quality of a team's output tends to approach the lowest common denominator within the team, which, by definition, is lower quality than the output of the team's best member. Conversely, the individual contributor's output is improved by consideration of outside perspectives -- be they provided by team members, bosses, consultants, etc.
In essence, the most functional structure is a team in which each member has a clearly defined role to contribute. You're not forcing each decision to be group-thunk; rather, you're allowing each member to excel at what he or she excels in, then coming together to integrate and discuss.
Design by consensus is almost always a recipe for failure. It's important to distinguish between consensus-seeking (bad) and input-seeking (good). A productive group helps the individual refine and improve his work. An unproductive group debates every piece of work until it finally settles on something that nobody's too unhappy with (and often, that nobody's too thrilled with).
When it comes to distractions and thinking, less is more, and forced constant interaction is bad.
Its a rational and sensible choice, consciously or unconsciously. The individual team member with the strongest focus on sociopath skills in a team will reap all the benefit from team members who mistakenly instead focus on productive skills/activities. Therefore any productive team members ALWAYS benefit from doing the absolute minimum, letting the "team" concept fail, and implementing their own solution. There are two optimum success modes, one where the whole team never reaps any personal success (psuedo-anonymous closed ranks at least from external view or its simply not a sociopath-compatible success oriented task) or where the whole team has no one with any sociopath skills at all or at least perfectly matched sociopath skills (good luck). Maybe the TLDR is you can try to create a team, but the member with the best social skills will make the other members destroy it, or at least convert it from a "team" to "a group of people with a semi-common goal not working together at all".
The other interpretation is nothing paralyzes as well as a separation between responsibility and authority, and nothing defines that separation quite like a team. Fundamentally nothing ever gets done by a group, its always one individual where the rubber meets the road, so all you really need is that one individual, the rest of the team was excess baggage other than maybe providing peer pressure on the lone actual worker.
This is the Theory Z teamism. It's a cargo-cult mentality that doesn't work, leads to mediocrity, and makes a farce of the concept of a "team". Theory X was extreme pessimism toward workers: rob them or they'll rob you. Theory Y was extreme optimism-- treat them well, and they'll return the favor. Theory Y worked very well until 1980 or so when the yuppie generation sold out their employers' secrets to score private equity jobs, proving that human nature can be quite nasty.
Theory Z is the compromise, based on the idea that people are neither altruistic nor egoistic but most, by default, are localistic. They care about the people they spend a lot of time with. They'll screw over "the company" given the right incentives, but interpersonal cohesion keeps them honest enough, if it's done right-- at least, in theory. That's Theory Z and while it's the most accurate in its view of human nature (localism, not universal altruism or degenerate egoism) it's still wrongheaded and leads to mediocrity.
It fails in several ways. Namely, the only thing people on a "team" share is that they report to the same manager. Often, they didn't choose to be on that project (closed allocation) which means they actually share nothing in common. So there's nothing that makes them a team. In fact, since the most common thing to unite people in such circumstances is a common enemy (management) the bosses would often prefer they not be a real team.
Further reading:
* http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/12/gervais-macle...
* http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/gervais-macle...
In particular, his account of how the axis of freedom vs control in this sort of management theory obscured the nature of conflict in an organization.
Of course, some might think that obscuring the reality of organizational politics is precisely the point of management theory. I would call that a cynical point of view but that wouldn't be strictly accurate. (See http://rdn32.com/2013/01/27/on-cynicism/)
I've written a lot about the concept of simple trust. Essentially, it means trusting people to do their work and generally do the right thing. It doesn't mean you'd hand them a suitcase with $5 million in it; it means you think the person is competent and not an idiot or scumbag. Not all trust is binary, but simple trust ("bozo bit") is, and it's also symmetric and usually transitive, so it becomes systemic. It's actually binary across a company (trust-dense or trust-sparse) and I think those tie into K- and r-selection.
If you don't have simple trust, you'll end up with a company where employees are treated badly, so they treat it badly (as they should) and it eventually fails.