
The Rise of the New Groupthink (2012) - edandersen
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
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koltkorivera
The author does well to point the finger for the New Groupthink at
contemporary educational practices--which, on the one hand, extol "nurturing
each student's uniqueness" but then only value that uniqueness if it is
amenable to "being a collaborative team player." The fact is, for a lot of
bright people, they feel forced into perpetual collaboration, and experience
it like unto that of enduring extended root canals.

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.

~~~
Ensorceled
Yes, one of my kids teachers even used a sports team analogy for "uniqueness"
-- "like a hockey team needs a centre, a right winger, a defenceman and a
goalie, everybody has their place".

She didn't get it when I asked where the long distance runner fit in.

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nate
I remember working for Accenture and never having a good place to think.

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.

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duggan
I've read her book ( _Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t
Stop Talking._ ); it's a good read, especially so for anyone who identifies
with what the article speaks of but hasn't ruminated on it too deeply before.
Goes double, really, because if you haven't had time to think on it you're
probably becoming increasingly frustrated without realizing why.

Take anything anyone claims to tells you about yourself with a grain of salt,
of course, but I found it interesting.

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jitl
I have to take issue with her bit about the follies of "brainstorming."

> 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.

~~~
jonnathanson
The behavioral studies basically bear out a combination of what she's saying
and what you're saying.

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).

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Aloha
I think this person hit it on the head.

When it comes to distractions and thinking, less is more, and forced constant
interaction is bad.

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migtav
There was already some talk over this here at HN:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3462439>

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VLM
"People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work"

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.

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anigbrowl
It's very rare that a book promo article makes me want to buy the book, but
this one certainly succeeded.

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drcongo
If you're in the UK, this radio show on iPlayer covers some similar ground
(and the author of the NYT piece features in the show).

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rr7zq>

------
fudged71
Thanks for posting this, I got a lot of value out of it.

------
michaelochurch
First of all, open-plan offices border on back-door health discrimination. I'm
surprised they're legal, to be frank about it.

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/2013/03/12/gervais-macleod-8-human-nature-theories-x-y-z-and-a/)

* [http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/gervais-macle...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/gervais-macleod-20-bozo-bit-vs-simple-trust/)

~~~
robin2
I thought Matthew Stewart's take on Theory X / Theory Y from a few years back
was fairly sharp: <http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00029?gko=5d297>

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/>)

~~~
michaelochurch
That's interesting. I think I must be a Y/T then. I believe that people are at
their best if trusted (to do their work) but I also believe that human
aggregates are doomed to eventual dissolution. The goal is to create value
while you can and leave a legacy that allows newer and better institutions
(formed decades or centuries later, so perhaps long after individual death) to
learn from it.

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.

