Here are some quotes from this really great article that I think indicate ways of moving forward. To innovate and accelerate positive change in neighbourhoods, any movement may need a strong internet-based component. The conversations we have need to expand internationally to as big a network as possible.Please circulate a link to this post to whomever may be interested.I look forward to your comments.
New York Times, Sunday Review.
The author of the forthcoming book “Quiet: The Power of Introverts
in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.” By SUSAN CAIN
Published: January 13, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html?_r=3&hp&pagewanted=all
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
- END -
I think its fair to add that much of the innovation in terms of bringing compassion and environmental thinking to society is coming from movements.
We need to bear in mind that movements:
- Never consisted of collaborations among Picassos and Buddhas.
- Require input from everyone - doers, thinkers, feelers, inspirers, facilitators.
- Require collaborations among people of all generations.
- Encourage peer-learning for skills development, empowerment and leadership.
Andrew.
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