Go it Alone (How Groups Kill Creativity)

In her book Quiet, Susan Cain talks about how collaboration kills creativity. She even shows us how group brainstorming isn’t as effective as we might think.  While you might wonder how this is true—aren’t two or three heads better than one?—Cain provides a mighty strong argument that groups working together can indeed put the nail in the creative coffin.  It’s much more likely that alone in your home office or alone at a café (where I am now) you’re going to be more effective at coming up with great new concepts. 

According to Cain, psychologists have three explanations supporting this concept: social loafing, production blocking and evaluation apprehension. The first explains that groups of people, being the social beings we are, tend to dissolve into non-productive interaction with frequency; small talk, gossip, and catching up on the news are all some of the behaviors we might fall back on. The second addresses the fact that when one person monopolizes the floor with his idea, the rest don’t have an opportunity to do much else except listen. It’s the third one that fascinates me, and it goes to the dreaded:

Fear of Public Humiliation

When groups of people are thrown together for a creative collaboration, the fear of public humiliation is as present as the white board. It’s a potent force that we underestimate.  The fear of other people judging us puts handcuffs on us, especially when it comes to creative output. And even if the rules say “no judging,” we all revert back to that fear that we might say something stupid. No one wants to be ridiculed. No one wants to be laughed at. So clamming up in front of your peers is a more likely outcome if you’re on the fence about whether or not to speak up.

Group Size

Quiet also points to group size and how it impacts creativity. Citing studies old and new, the evidence Cain spotlights comes to an interesting conclusion: quality of creative output goes down the more people you add to the group. A group of nine will produce lower quality ideas, and fewer of them. A group of four will yield higher quality and more ideas. You can start to see why this might be so. If you’re joining a live group-think and you’re asked to contribute your concepts, it seems a lot less daunting to be ridiculed by three others than eight.

The one time that collaboration is deemed highly effective is when it’s online. It’s called electronic collaboration, or New Groupthink. I submit something, someone else responds to what I uploaded, and so forth. But here you can imagine that what’s really happening is that individuals are working alone in their own silos. That’s a very different dynamic than nine people in a room together.

So the next time someone says Let’s meet and we’ll all have a brainstorming session, you might want to consider having one by yourself.