The Rise of the New Groupthink
From the NYTimes:
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. […]
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.
This totally validates the way I like to work, and makes me feel less guilty about not being able to contribute to brainstorming sessions, haha… Some good quotes in there:
Picasso - “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.”
Steve Wozniak - “I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take… Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”
Could someone please tell my boss about this part? I don’t think I’ve ever had more than 30-60 minute of uninterrupted work time. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.
