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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.