
Evidence that collaboration results in group-think and mediocrity - sus_007
https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/collaboration-kills-creativity-according-to-science.html
======
staunch
Creativity seems unimpeded when the one being creative is at the very top of
the hierarchy. It doesn't really work for anyone else unless they have a
direct contribution and connection to the dictator though.

Any requirement that new stuff be reviewed by committee (e.g. a board of
directors) will tend to destroy anything truly innovative.

Why? Because the creative people can see much further than the (much less
involved) committee. They seem like crazy people talking about a world that
doesn't (yet) exist.

Elon Musk is doing so well because he has such an iron grip over his
companies. If he ever becomes subject to real oversight he'll fail as hard as
Jobs did under Scully.

~~~
icebraining
Elon Musk does have oversight, in the form of his investors. His creative
vision had to pass through the scrutiny of the boards of those companies and
individuals which invested in Tesla and SpaceX.

There's also plenty of cases of actual employees being innovative. The work
produced by employees of SRI (e.g. Douglas Engelbart's team) and of Bell Labs
eclipses Tesla and SpaceX in terms of innovation.

~~~
fsloth
"There's also plenty of cases of actual employees being innovative." Uh, I
don't think that was being questioned here. Englebart did not have a committee
to gauge his budget, only the low-bureaucratic ARPA system where he had to
convince only one technical person, and not a commitee of generals to get his
funding. I presume ARPA itself was under more traditional guidance.

The question was not that there can always be only one protean creator in an
organization. The point was that a crowd adds no value to the divergent
thought process of innovation. Only a productizes output can be sanely
evaluated by a large group. At this point the question is not 'could this
work' but rather, does it. The former is subject to mere opinions, whereas the
latter is more or less a matter of objective measurement (if done honestly).

------
Quanttek
Article seems pretty bad. It already starts of horrendously when they call the
journal "ScienceDirect.com". That's just Elsevier's site. The journal is
called "Personality and Individual Differences."

Furthermore, this is how the study assessed creativity:

> creativity was assessed with 10 items (e.g., “I have a vivid imagination”)
> from the International Personality Item Pool [...]. Participants rated the
> accuracy of the items as they applied to themselves on a 5-point scale (1 =
> Very inaccurate, 5 = Very accurate).

Meaning that they self-assessed how creative they currently feel. It was not
measured how creative they actually are (though I wouldn't know how you could
do that)

And these are the findings:

> shyness was related positively to both types of aggression, anxiety
> sensitivity, and social anhedonia, and was related negatively to creativity.
> Avoidance was related positively to both types of aggression and social
> anhedonia, and was related negatively to creativity. Of note, unsociability
> was related negatively to both types of aggression, and was related
> positively to creativity.

This directly contradicts the article's claims of "the character traits of
'shyness, avoidance, [and] unsociability' [...] are positively associated with
creativity."

And, as others pointed out happiness != creative output as implied in the
article: "Furthermore, intelligent people are happier when they have less
social interaction, even with their friends"

So it seems like it's not as clear cut as they make it out to be.

~~~
afpx
It’s so bad that I decided to put “Inc.” in my garbage media blacklist. After
scanning their previous articles posted to HN, I relialized that I should have
done it sooner.

~~~
Quanttek
Is your "garbage meda blacklist" only a metaphor or do you actually have one.
if that's the case, how do you maintain it and how do let it affect your
browsing (e.g. do you block the site or simply have a document somewhere
sitting on your computer containing the list)?

------
bwasti
Where’s the evidence? Self reported happiness of intelligent people in those
situations does not prove anything with regard to collaboration killing
creativity. What if creativity tends to come with unhappiness?

~~~
dEnigma
There is some research in that direction. Some of it with the result, that
sadness/unhappiness actually feeds creativity.

[https://www.wired.com/2010/10/feeling-sad-makes-us-more-
crea...](https://www.wired.com/2010/10/feeling-sad-makes-us-more-creative/)

------
progman
Oustanding progress usually comes from individuals, not from outstanding
groups. Consider Newton, Archimedes, da Vinci, Jesus Christ, Luther,
Gutenberg, Mozart, Einstein, Zuse, Edison, and others. They changed the world.

Unfortunately, there is also evil genius (in wickedness) of individuals [1]:
Jack the Ripper, Hitler, Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Hussein, etc.

[1] [https://www.ranker.com/crowdranked-list/the-all-time-
worst-p...](https://www.ranker.com/crowdranked-list/the-all-time-worst-people-
in-history)

Groups are usually _always_ mediocre since there are not many geniuses. It
explains why systems of extreme group thinking like Communism never work out.

It is interesting that even outstanding things created by comittee - Ada for
instance - are barely successful while inventions of individuals - Wirth's
Pascal, Kernighan's C and von Rossum's Python for instance -- were/are widely
successful.

~~~
escherplex
Or as one evil genius observed:

When groups of small men attempt great enterprises they always end by reducing
them to the level of their own mediocrity (Napoleon)

Or as one modern creative genius put it:

What do you care what other people think? (Feynman)

------
olivermarks
This is a junk article in my opinion. I ran the global collaboration open
source environment for sony Playstation last decade and was heavily involved
with 'enterprise 2.0' in the web 2.0 era.

The idea that 'collaboration' is cramming everyone into an open plan office is
idiotic and has more to do with corporate cost saving than any coherent
attempt at getting people to work better together.

Remote/home working collaboration is the norm now, yet the old command and
control hierarchies, because they generally don't work that way, still have
little visibility or understanding of how people actually work together.

~~~
CodeWriter23
I think it's collaboration by choice vs. collaboration by dictate. I had an
awful time having to work with people that weren't at my level. And the work
(not calling it "my" work, btw) always suffered as a result.

Then in my most recent project, I've done some of the best work of my life in
conjunction with a collaborator. She was someone I chose, and we both brought
our respective disciplines to bear. We were both quite open to and respectful
of each other's input. But a lot of our work was done in solitude. Sometimes
one or the other would bring a surprise to the next meeting, a distinctly
different yet more elegant solution to the problem we set out to solve. It was
easy for either of us to cast aside prior agreements and accept the more
awesome result.

In previous jobs, I would be chastised for "going rogue" if I took a side
journey to make something awesome. Some managers are blind to benefits like
reductions in customer support/general headaches, increase in usability,
reduction of time and motion, or just the general wow factor, when they are
looking at meeting minutes.

IMO Collaboration is like any other tool. It can work fantastically when
employed by skilled practitioners. And will produce shoddy results in the
hands of the unskilled. Ego, pride and self-obsession also contribute to
failure. It takes a somewhat enlightened person to be willing to let someone
else in to their creative process. To accept criticism as a necessary part of
the process of making great work, instead of taking it personally. To go to
the mat as the lone dissenting voice when they know they're on to something
great. And to know the difference when their own idea is something really
great vs. gratuitous crap.

------
woliveirajr
And that's why I hate that tendency that decisions and so on must be taken
under -consensus-

If something will be decided by what everybody agrees, you're assuring it'll
be by the lowest possible dominator, the lowest level that makes everybody
understand and agree to.

~~~
perpetualcrayon
All we have to do is raise the comprehension level of (1/2 * n + 1) voters for
democracy to work well. And it's not a perpetual cycle. The universe's
complexity is finite.

~~~
QAPereo
_The universe 's complexity is finite._

For a given bounded region.

------
rlv-dan
A problem is that systems today are too big and complicated for a single
person to build and manage. What's the best way to collaborate without loosing
the creativity needed to push forward making the system better?

~~~
js8
This is a great question. I think the answer is, you, as a creative person,
need to come up with good abstractions that let you present your idea well-
enough without having to do too much work.

I have been thinking about abstraction recently (for other reasons, related to
learning). To me, abstraction is transformation of the space with the problem
to a space where you can easier manipulate the objects the way the problem
requires it. For example, we can have image represented as pixels, and we can
abstract it into lines and geometric shapes. So the operation, such as moving
this triangle from here to there, that would be complicated in pixel
representation becomes trivial in the more abstracted, geometric shape
representation.

Back to the original point. Here are some examples of people invoking
abstraction in order to solve some problem:

E.F.Codd invented relational model (abstraction) for databases. It let him
solve some issues that people struggled with before (how to organize data and
build queries) more efficiently.

Jeff Dean invented the map-reduce paradigm of distributed computation. The
original map-reduce implementation was only about 1000 lines of code.

You can also see that abstraction has a cost - it doesn't let you do all
possible operations more efficiently, just some that you might be interested
in. It's a trade off that you have to make in order to present your idea to
the world, to make it work. However, the point is to solve enough with the new
abstraction that other people take notice and will naturally help dealing with
the complexity of the edge cases.

There are many other examples of abstraction from computer science (for
example, high-level languages), and even more examples in mathematics. It's
how many mathematicians conduct their business - trying to come up with new
abstractions (new definitions) that let you handle complicated proofs in a
more straightforward way.

------
partycoder
Groupthink is the loss of critical thinking as a consequence of cohesion and
conflict avoidance.

Groupthink can be avoided if the culture rewards critical thinking. That
includes:

\- team members should be free to dissent from the majority if there's a
reason.

\- team members should keep a reasonable level of skepticism when it comes to
other members' claims. if someone shows high confidence, that confidence
should be also be subject to skepticism.

\- if someone wishes to communicate their opinion, it needs to be done
explicitly. e.g: in my opinion, <opinion here>. Interleaving opinions and
facts creates unnecessary noise and bias. Usage of superlatives should be kept
to a minimum as well.

~~~
valuearb
The problem is that these principles are counter to his normal social
relationships work. For example, if your boss is on the majority side, it’s
significantly harder for most people to dissent. Being skeptical can be
perceived as being rude, so many won’t do it.

------
mrhappyunhappy
I wonder what their definition of an intelligent person is? Is it a person who
scored high on a test, a master of his her profession or a high school dropout
who was so fascinated with Bitcoin that he got in early and now a millionaire?

~~~
jondubois
Most wealthy people are moderately intelligent.

Really intelligent people often are poor... Once you get rich, you get lazy
because your money starts working for you and people around you constantly
feed you with false confidence and optimism and this makes you even lazier.

The smartest people I know are all poor in terms of wealth but sometimes they
have high incomes.

Intelligence is not a single thing because there are many different types and
almost no one is good at all of them.

There is emotional intelligence, reasoning ability, critical thinking,
communication ability, spatial reasoning skills, mathematical ability,
subconscious reasoning, etc...

~~~
averagewall
Most(all?) types of intelligence are positively correlated. So if you have a
natural ability at one of those things, then you're more likely to be high in
the others too. Even something as simple as reaction time is correlated with
IQ.

~~~
jondubois
I completely disagree. Most engineers and mathematicians have low emotional
intelligence compared to lawyers, real estate agents and business people.

Most engineers I know have trouble reading facial cues when interacting with
other people. Also they don't realize when they are being manipulated and they
are incapable of manipulating others to get what they want.

People who have high emotional intelligence can essentially read the other
person's emotions while they're talking to them and they can use the feedback
to adjust their speech to make it more convincing. I think that's definitely a
form of intelligence and it requires a lot of practice as well as natural
skill.

I've met some very uneducated people with very high emotional intelligence.

------
b0rsuk
What about brainstorming, the phenomenon where people inspire each other by
building upon each others' ideas ? For me it tends to result in solutions
neither of us would come up with alone. Sometimes it even comes out of
_misunderstanding_ of another person's intention - like, you read a forum
thread title, an issue or a newspaper headline and think it implies something
else.

~~~
mamon
There's some evidence that brainstorming is less effective than telling people
to prepare a list of few ideas before the meeting and then merging those lists
[1]. During brainstorming sessions people's creativity seem to be limited by
other people ideas, not inspired by them.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/brainstorming-3-reasons-
why-e...](http://www.businessinsider.com/brainstorming-3-reasons-why-
everything-you-know-is-wrong-2013-5) (sorry, couldn't hunt down original paper
mentioned in the article)

~~~
megaman22
In my experience, brainstorming tends to be dominated by whoever is loudest
and least coherent - the fuzzier and less thought-out an idea is, the easier
it is for everyone in the room to agree on the broadest strokes, and have
completely different understandings of how to actually get there.

Try to pin them down on specifics, and you get labeled as obstructionist or
otherwise "difficult".

------
boomboomsubban
The leaps from the sources provided to the conclusion this article draws are
massive, and those sources aren't suggesting "collaboration results in group-
think and mediocrity."

------
mannykannot
If this were broadly true, large science projects like the the human genome
mapping, LIGO, and especially the LHC, would have little chance of success.

In one of his autobiographical books, Richard Feynman has a passage in which
he says that one of the best things about being at Caltech was the constant
interaction with other talented people. The practice of science is much more
collaborative than popular 'great men' hagiography portrays it.

I have no doubt at all that there are many examples where forced collaboration
has been counter-productive, but the successes of modern science suggest that
this article is completely wrong about the optimal conditions for creativity.

~~~
pmarreck
science ≠ creativity

------
knolan
Article incorrectly names the journal as Elselvier journal ScienceDirect.com.

It’s actually Personality and Individual Differences

------
limaoscarjuliet
Group think is pretty good if you select your group well.

------
sgt101
What evidence was that then? A survey?

