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2012-01-17 18:38:05
By SUSAN CAIN
Published: January 13, 2012
SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in
thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and
achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams,
in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone
geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.
But there s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people
are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And
the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted,
according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory
Feist. They re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see
themselves as independent and individualistic. They re not joiners by nature.
One explanation for these findings is that introverts are comfortable working
alone and solitude is a catalyst to innovation. As the influential
psychologist Hans Eysenck observed, introversion fosters creativity by
concentrating the mind on the tasks in hand, and preventing the dissipation of
energy on social and sexual matters unrelated to work. In other words, a
person sitting quietly under a tree in the backyard, while everyone else is
clinking glasses on the patio, is more likely to have an apple land on his
head. (Newton was one of the world s great introverts: William Wordsworth
described him as A mind for ever/ Voyaging through strange seas of Thought,
alone. )
Solitude has long been associated with creativity and transcendence. Without
great solitude, no serious work is possible, Picasso said. A central narrative
of many religions is the seeker Moses, Jesus, Buddha who goes off by
himself and brings profound insights back to the community.
Culturally, we re often so dazzled by charisma that we overlook the quiet part
of the creative process. Consider Apple. In the wake of Steve Jobs s death, we
ve seen a profusion of myths about the company s success. Most focus on Mr.
Jobs s supernatural magnetism and tend to ignore the other crucial figure in
Apple s creation: a kindly, introverted engineering wizard, Steve Wozniak, who
toiled alone on a beloved invention, the personal computer.
Rewind to March 1975: Mr. Wozniak believes the world would be a better place if
everyone had a user-friendly computer. This seems a distant dream most
computers are still the size of minivans, and many times as pricey. But Mr.
Wozniak meets a simpatico band of engineers that call themselves the Homebrew
Computer Club. The Homebrewers are excited about a primitive new machine called
the Altair 8800. Mr. Wozniak is inspired, and immediately begins work on his
own magical version of a computer. Three months later, he unveils his amazing
creation for his friend, Steve Jobs. Mr. Wozniak wants to give his invention
away free, but Mr. Jobs persuades him to co-found Apple Computer.
The story of Apple s origin speaks to the power of collaboration. Mr. Wozniak
wouldn t have been catalyzed by the Altair but for the kindred spirits of
Homebrew. And he d never have started Apple without Mr. Jobs.
But it s also a story of solo spirit. If you look at how Mr. Wozniak got the
work done the sheer hard work of creating something from nothing he did it
alone. Late at night, all by himself.
Intentionally so. In his memoir, Mr. Wozniak offers this guidance to aspiring
inventors:
Most inventors and engineers I ve met are like me ... they live in their
heads. They re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists.
And artists work best alone .... I m going to give you some advice that might
be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone... Not on a committee. Not on a
team.
And yet. The New Groupthink has overtaken our workplaces, our schools and our
religious institutions. Anyone who has ever needed noise-canceling headphones
in her own office or marked an online calendar with a fake meeting in order to
escape yet another real one knows what I m talking about. Virtually all
American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open-plan
offices, in which no one has a room of one s own. During the last decades,
the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet,
from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010.
Our schools have also been transformed by the New Groupthink. Today, elementary
school classrooms are commonly arranged in pods of desks, the better to foster
group learning. Even subjects like math and creative writing are often taught
as committee projects. In one fourth-grade classroom I visited in New York
City, students engaged in group work were forbidden to ask a question unless
every member of the group had the very same question.
The New Groupthink also shapes some of our most influential religious
institutions. Many mega-churches feature extracurricular groups organized
around every conceivable activity, from parenting to skateboarding to real
estate, and expect worshipers to join in. They also emphasize a theatrical
style of worship loving Jesus out loud, for all the congregation to see.
Often the role of a pastor seems closer to that of church cruise director than
to the traditional roles of spiritual friend and counselor, said Adam McHugh,
an evangelical pastor and author of Introverts in the Church.
SOME teamwork is fine and offers a fun, stimulating, useful way to exchange
ideas, manage information and build trust.
But it s one thing to associate with a group in which each member works
autonomously on his piece of the puzzle; it s another to be corralled into
endless meetings or conference calls conducted in offices that afford no
respite from the noise and gaze of co-workers. Studies show that open-plan
offices make workers hostile, insecure and distracted. They re also more likely
to suffer from high blood pressure, stress, the flu and exhaustion. And people
whose work is interrupted make 50 percent more mistakes and take twice as long
to finish it.
Many introverts seem to know this instinctively, and resist being herded
together. Backbone Entertainment, a video game development company in
Emeryville, Calif., initially used an open-plan office, but found that its game
developers, many of whom were introverts, were unhappy. It was one big
warehouse space, with just tables, no walls, and everyone could see each other,
recalled Mike Mika, the former creative director. We switched over to
cubicles and were worried about it you d think in a creative environment that
people would hate that. But it turns out they prefer having nooks and crannies
they can hide away in and just be away from everybody.
Privacy also makes us productive. In a fascinating study known as the Coding
War Games, consultants Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister compared the work of more
than 600 computer programmers at 92 companies. They found that people from the
same companies performed at roughly the same level but that there was an
enormous performance gap between organizations. What distinguished programmers
at the top-performing companies wasn t greater experience or better pay. It was
how much privacy, personal workspace and freedom from interruption they
enjoyed. Sixty-two percent of the best performers said their workspace was
sufficiently private compared with only 19 percent of the worst performers.
Seventy-six percent of the worst programmers but only 38 percent of the best
said that they were often interrupted needlessly.
Solitude can even help us learn. According to research on expert performance by
the psychologist Anders Ericsson, the best way to master a field is to work on
the task that s most demanding for you personally. And often the best way to do
this is alone. Only then, Mr. Ericsson told me, can you go directly to the
part that s challenging to you. If you want to improve, you have to be the one
who generates the move. Imagine a group class you re the one generating the
move only a small percentage of the time.
Conversely, brainstorming sessions are one of the worst possible ways to
stimulate creativity. The brainchild of a charismatic advertising executive
named Alex Osborn who believed that groups produced better ideas than
individuals, workplace brainstorming sessions came into vogue in the 1950s.
The quantitative results of group brainstorming are beyond question, Mr.
Osborn wrote. One group produced 45 suggestions for a home-appliance
promotion, 56 ideas for a money-raising campaign, 124 ideas on how to sell more
blankets.
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.
The one important exception to this dismal record is electronic brainstorming,
where large groups outperform individuals; and the larger the group the better.
The protection of the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why
the Internet has yielded such wondrous collective creations. Marcel Proust
called reading a miracle of communication in the midst of solitude, and that
s what the Internet is, too. It s a place where we can be alone together and
this is precisely what gives it power.
MY point is not that man is an island. Life is meaningless without love, trust
and friendship.
And I m not suggesting that we abolish teamwork. Indeed, recent studies suggest
that influential academic work is increasingly conducted by teams rather than
by individuals. (Although teams whose members collaborate remotely, from
separate universities, appear to be the most influential of all.) The problems
we face in science, economics and many other fields are more complex than ever
before, and we ll need to stand on one another s shoulders if we can possibly
hope to solve them.
But even if the problems are different, human nature remains the same. And most
humans have two contradictory impulses: we love and need one another, yet we
crave privacy and autonomy.
To harness the energy that fuels both these drives, we need to move beyond the
New Groupthink and embrace a more nuanced approach to creativity and learning.
Our offices should encourage casual, cafe-style interactions, but allow people
to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone. Our
schools should teach children to work with others, but also to work on their
own for sustained periods of time. And we must recognize that introverts like
Steve Wozniak need extra quiet and privacy to do their best work.
Before Mr. Wozniak started Apple, he designed calculators at Hewlett-Packard, a
job he loved partly because HP made it easy to chat with his colleagues. Every
day at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., management wheeled in doughnuts and coffee, and
people could socialize and swap ideas. What distinguished these interactions
was how low-key they were. For Mr. Wozniak, collaboration meant the ability to
share a doughnut and a brainwave with his laid-back, poorly dressed colleagues
who minded not a whit when he disappeared into his cubicle to get the real
work done.
Susan Cain is the author of the forthcoming book Quiet: The Power of
Introverts in a World That Can t Stop Talking.
Balance. (Score:5, Insightful)
There has to be a balance between one's teamwork and individual creativity.
On the one hand, you can have prima donnas running the whole show, doing really
great things that have absolutely nothing to do with actually getting a product
out the door.
On the other hand, you can take extreme programming to the extreme, piss of
your rock stars, and wind up with them quitting, and get trainwreck product.
Bottom line is that any team management approach needs to be able to milk
everyone for the best they've got without stiffing creativity, or putting the
wrong people at the helm for the sake alone of giving them a chance to drive.
Just some random thoughts as I sit alone blasting out my Saturday code...
Well you just committed the ultimate faux pas of the go-go team getters. You
must always work as a team, and if you don't, you're not a team player. And as
such, you should go find another job.
Really though, most people with a couple of firing braincells already knew that
some people are better specialized to working in groups, and others to solitary
tasks. The brain specializes itself to it's situation and needs. Leave it to
the idiots of psych to think that if you jam people into a group, that it will
always result in the best actions and solutions.
I recently finished a couple of years of working remotely from home instead of
going into an office. I think it was some of the most productive work I've
done. I collaborated with other engineers using Jabber, phone, and NetMeeting
when needed but otherwise was able to work without interruption (kids are grown
and moved out). Not commuting means I also worked longer hours. Yet my new job
requires me to commute and be an Office Space drone. Why?
Because the perception of value is also important. Most managers have very
little idea of how much effort is involved in programming. If you are in a
cubicle, then they can see how much of your time is spent doing something that
looks like working. If you are at home, then they can only judge you by your
results and they are not good at judging the value of your results. One
solution is to ensure that junior management is capable of doing your job, so
that they know how much time it should take. Another is for the company to
simply stop caring about how hard it is and work out how much your output is
worth to them and pay you appropriately. This works for me as a freelancer: I
often work for people on other continents, so they have no way of checking how
long things actually take me. If they pay me for a day's worth of work, then
they're happy if the results they get are worth (to them) at least the amount
that they paid me. If I actually did the work in 10 minutes in between Slashdot
posts then they wouldn't actually care, unless someone else was willing and
able to do the same work for them for less.
Job offers invariably require applicants to "work well with others" and "enjoy
team work". I don't like team work, and I work well with others if I have to,
but it's not natural to me.
Well guess what: at each and every job interview I've been to, I lied and
pretended I enjoyed working with others, when in reality I like being left the
fuck alone to do a good job. Same thing on my resume: if you believe what I put
in it, you'd think I'm a social monster. All the folks I know who are a bit of
an introvert like I am similariy bullshit their way through job interviews.
Everybody knows it, head hunters know it, employers know it, so why do they
carry on asking those "skills"?
Well.... maybe because putting this on your resume doesn't look so good:
- Capable of refraining from telling co-workers that they're fucking inbred
morons who would benefit from a course in remedial keyboarding, and that if
they ever check in shit like that again that they'll discover that it is, in
fact, possible to insert a 23 inch monitor into an arbitrary orifices.
You forget another, more glamorous possibility: I would very much enjoy putting
"capable of concentrating long and hard on any problem, able to work on my own
at a problem until it's fully and properly solved" in my resume. In this day
and age, where most people seem to glorify short attention spans and teamwork
(which is usually just a way dividing the individual brainpower required to
perform a certain task, and diluting responsibility when things go wrong), this
would seem like a worthwhile skill to offer to an employer.
But no, if you don't pretend you like teamwork and you work well with others in
your resume, you can be sure it'll be chucked out in the trashcan right off the
bat. It's almost automatic, so much so that it's almost impossible to find a
resume *without* that line.
Note to any employer. If you've found a company that actually wants (and is
willing to pay for) a proper solution, then I suggest that you do everything
that you can to make sure you keep your job there. Most companies want a
vaguely good-enough solution right now, and if it's a money sink in two years
then, well, it will be someone else's responsibility by then...
> Everybody knows it, head hunters know it, employers know it, so why do they
carry on asking those "skills"?
Because as Marti Olsen [amazon.com] points out, the majority of people are
extroverts, and assume anyone who is not like them is defective. So extroverts
love brainstorming, group think and other social work environments, so they
think everyone should enjoy it and demand it in others.
The right answer is, as other people have said on this thread, balance.
Sometimes we should work together, but also sometimes we should leave each
other the f--- alone.
But because extroverts tend to be disconnected from facts and experience, they
instead remember when they were happiest which was brainstorming sessions or
other team activities. Thus they demand it.
To be fair, that's only about 30% of the hiring managers out there. The other
70% actually want people with political skills. The ability to negotiate with
people they disagree with, to get people to go along with an idea, to
contribute to the group when required instead of being a lone wolf causing
problems or sniping. Introverts make excellent politicians in this
regard--usually the Karl Rove backroom operator or chief-of-staff. But it's
somehow off-putting to state: "Don't be an obstinate asshole who has to get his
way and bullies others to achieve his goals -- yes, that means not you, John
Bolton [wikipedia.org]." on the job posting.
So just look at "work well with others" and "enjoy team work" to mean you're
not a douchebag or a dickhead. It doesn't necessarily mean you are a people
person.
> Everybody knows it, head hunters know it, employers know it, so why do they
carry on asking those "skills"?
It's a submission ritual. By asking you a silly question and evaluating your
answer, they judge how much you are willing to play by the rules, no matter how
ridiculous.
Ah - this is not balance.
But hey - I'm sure you'll do great hiring all the extroverted, group thinking
types who copied each other's homework for your development team.
You know, the ones who were swapping media with the coding assignments on it 15
minutes before class instead of paying the dues of the late night hack sessions
while in college.
I can already smell the stench of buggy, unmaintainable, inefficient,
undocumented, crash prone expensive code from here.
But hey - at least you're creating jobs for us elitists. Because eventually,
with an attitude like that, you're going to wind up on your knees, begging us
to take your money and insane signing bonus to fix the mess you're going to
create.
I work best alone when I'm trying to solve a problem that I'm really passionate
about. Sadly a lot of times that doesn't describe what I get paid for, and in
those cases having a group around me helps to stay on task. if I'm alone, I'm
fighting against myself the whole time to stay focused and not work on what I
think is interesting.
Groupthink
Social groups deter any kind of radical thought or behavior. That's the
groupthink [wikipedia.org] phenomenon. The larger the group, the stronger the
effect. That's why creativity never thrives in large organizations, and that's
the reason the most creative social construct is the single person who does not
need to compromise his or her ideas for the harmony of the group.
I roll my eyes every time I hear an organization of thousands of people is
proclaiming it fosters innovation (or diversity, but that's another story
[utwente.nl]).
People need to understand what being Introvert actually means. Being social or
easily small-talking doesn't make someone extrovert, and you can't be
'extrovert' for this and that but 'introvert' for these. It just doesn't work
that way. Introversion is taking energy in mentally from being alone and being
exhausted mentally by exposure to groups for a while. Extroversion is taking
energy in from social interactions while being depleted when alone. You
wouldn't have to be a genius then to come to Susan Cain's conclusion.
I would instead say that an introvert defines himself through what he does. An
extrovert defines himself through what other people think of what he does. An
introvert thus always wants to do the right (as in, rationally correct) thing,
because competence increases his self worth. An extrovert does not want to be
competent; he merely wants to be thought competent. The easiest way to achieve
that is to find some introvert underlings to do the actual work for which he
can then take credit, and increase his self worth. Because having people do as
they are told makes this easier, he tends to like conformity and obedience.
Conversely, he assumes that being conformant and obedient makes others like
him, because such behaviour improves their self worth.
When socializing in a group, extroverts brag to each other about their
accomplishments in order to "purchase" the group's higher opinion, and through
it a higher self worth. Listening is a valued skill because those who listen
politely, increase the braggart's self value.
When socializing in a group of introverts, introverts exchange information that
helps them become more competent. Intelligence is a valued attribute because it
helps others raise their own competence, increasing the listener's self value.
When an introvert is in a group of extroverts, he tries to "help" them by
giving out useful information. They don't understand why he does that, since
useful information does not increase their self worth. Only positive opinions
do that, and the introvert can't offer those because he values real competence,
which they don't have. So, after a few minutes of unsucessfully trying to get
some mutual back-patting going on, the extroverts move on, making a note never
to promote this ungrateful SOB.
Extroverts try to "help" the introvert by telling him how smart he is, which
frustrates him because he does not understand why they consider this
information valuable enough to communicate. After a few hours of trying to find
something valuable in the extroverts' small talk, he is stressed out from the
intense concentration because he thinks he's not competent enough to find it,
which then decreases his self worth. At that point the poor guy has to relax
for a while or go insane.
For this reason, socialization can only work on homogenous groups, and hiring
an introvert into an extrovert environment really messes things up for
everybody.
This is not new, it has been discovered in 1913, by a french agricultural
engineer Maximilien Ringelmann.
Various groups of people had to pull ropes, and Ringelmann discovered that
people unconsciously reduced their effort when they were in a group, even when
everybody except one in the group faked the rope-pulling !
The two biggest problems of collaborative work are:
1) communicating takes time, and you cannot work during this time
2) people provide less effort when they work collaboratively
Of course, there are a lot of advantages !
This is also related to social loafing
and it has interesting challenges, like raising funds for Wikipedia.
About creativity, I think that innovation is not a solitary activity.
You need to interact to get ideas, and the more you learn about diverse
subjects, the more you can be creative. This is why people like Leonardo da
Vinci were able to invent so much: they had a large knowledge across a lot of
domains. Nowadays, it's difficult to have such a broad knowledge, because we
need to concentrate on a few domains. This is why group brainstorming is
efficient: people with different views and approaches work on a common problem
by sharing their knowledge.
What hurts creativity the most is not group brainstorming, it's the fact that
people don't want to challenge themselves. This is called mental fixedness.
Now, everybody concentrates on improving current ideas, not challenging them or
creating new ones. New ideas emerge only when you are unsatisfied with the
current ideas.
On a personal note, I was an introvert 3 years ago, and I was a very good
coder. Since 3 years, I'm now an extrovert, and even though my social skills
increased tremendously, I don't enjoy coding anymore. I still enjoy solitary
activities, like writing for my blog, but I'm not interested into pure logic
anymore.
I believe that logic and introversion are related. I consider myself as a
creative guy, and my creativity which was used for writing code is now used on
social interactions.