SundayReview | Opinion: New York Times
The Rise of the New Groupthink
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.”
No comments:
Post a Comment