"The Rise of the New Groupthink", Susan Cain

Susan Cain's piece in the New York Times Sunday Review argues that American society is "in thrall" to the notion that forced gregariousness is key to "creativity and achievement". "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."

I haven't worked in a non-software development business environment in years, so I don't know whether Cain is accurately portraying how the world works, or rather, how the world is trying to get work done. I definitely agree with the following point, though.

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.

I can't stress enough the importance of giving people with genuinely creative work to do the time and space to do that work by themselves. A person tasked with bringing something new into the world through the power of his brain cannot succeed if he's constantly forced to interact with others.

Cain's other point, about the most creative people often being introverted, is a point that is slowly dawning on the world. I was unaware of that truth until I started reading The Introvert Advantage: How to Thrive in an Extrovert World by Marti Olsen Laney. I don't often link to books, but this one has had an enormously liberating effect on me; it explained why I have always reacted so negatively to certain situations, like forced socializing and team-building exercises, and has allowed me to consider different strategies of responding. I'm not, as Cain put it, a joiner by nature. (To be clear, let me add that I'm not among the most creative people: I'm just introverted.)

As I hinted above, the software development environments in which I've worked have all acknowledged programmers' absolute need for extended intervals of solitary work. I haven't worked for many different employers, but I can't imagine "the new groupthink" being successfully employed anywhere software is being written. Meetings and collaborations are necessary, of course, especially at the start of projects when goals are being set and no clear solution has been settled upon. After all have agreed on how a project is to be carried out, though, meetings are necessary evils at best, useful only to ensure that people are still on target and haven't created problems for themselves or others. Otherwise, software developers need to be as free as they can to focus.

After citing studies that show collaboration to be less optimal as a creative strategy than previously thought, Cain notes the intriguing counterexample provided by the Internet:

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.

As an explanation, this is mere hand-waving (and I suspect Proust did not mean that reading constituted mutual communication such as we're discussing). My own experience suggests a concrete explanation for why certain types of electronic communication work well for collaboration. As I noted several weeks ago, communications technologies come in two flavors:

The phone and other synchronous communication media, like instant messaging, are fundamentally unwelcome distractions. The ring of the phone or the chime of the new message is an imperative that must be responded to right now, even if the response is to let the call go to voicemail or to ignore the incoming message. Such distractions break one's concentration and can be significant impediments to progress.

Email represents a good tradeoff, in principle, between the sender's and receiver's priorities. The sender generally wants an answer sooner rather than later, but some respect is given to the receiver's need to get real work done.

Email is an asynchronous communication technology, as is Usenet news. Asynchronous electronic communication in general strikes the same balance between the sender's and receiver's needs as email. Many Internet communications protocols are asynchronous, and that's why they're so well-suited to collaborations. (It helps that those who collaborate via the 'net have been trained, by long use of the Internet, to expect that collaboration should work in this way.)

Extroverts, call your meetings: we know you love them, and we even understand that you benefit from them. Understand, though, that we introverts don't. Give us the space, and time, we need to be effective (and happy, for that matter).