When Collaboration Kills Creativity

Since our earliest attendance in school, we were forced to participate in groups among our peers to work towards a common goal, in fact, working in groups, under a good #leader, is indeed very effective, hence the saying “teamwork makes the dream work.” The big however, is that sometimes collaboration is not as effective as we think it is, even, an impediment that kills the very purpose of working as a team.

Alex Osborn, a legendary advertising man in the twentieth century, an author of several books, and co-founder of the advertising agency Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn (BBDO), invented the concept of brainstorming, a process in which the members of a group contribute ideas in a non-judgemental environment.

Osborn’s Brainstorming Rules:

1. Don’t judge or criticize ideas.
2. Be freewheeling. The wilder the idea, the better.
3. Go for quantity. The more ideas you have, the better.
4. Build on ideas of fellow group members.

“Osborn believed passionately that groups–once freed from the shackles of social judgement–produced more and better ideas than did individuals working in solitude,” wrote Susan Cain¹. Osborn’s brainstorming concept caught on quick and were adopted by company leaders with enthusiasm.

However, Osborn’s brainstorming theory doesn’t actually work in most cases. A study conducted in 1963 by Marvin Dunnette, a psychology professor at University of Minnesota, found interesting results on his brainstorming experiment. Forty-eight research scientists and forty-eight advertising executives, male employees of Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (also known as the inventors of the Post-it), were asked to participate in both solitary and group brainstorming sessions. Dunnette divided each set of forty-eight into twelve groups of four and were given a problem, difficulties of being born with an extra thumb, to brainstorm. In another session, each man were also given the same problem to brainstorm on his own. The results were surprising. Twenty-three of the twenty-four groups produced more ideas when they were working in solitude than collaborating. Also, the advertising executives did no better than the presumably introverted research scientists.

Since Dunnette’s experiment, forty years later, the same conclusion were found by similar studies: performance worsen as the group size increase, group brainstorming has a negative correlation to performance. The “evidence suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups . . . If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority,” wrote organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham.

Osborn’s Brainstorming Cons:

1. Social loafing. Some people let others do the work. Spectators.
2. Production blocking. Only one person can produce an idea at once, rendering others to sit passively, potentially killing originality, or worse, forgetting their own ideas.
3. Evaluation apprehension. The fear of looking stupid in front of one’s peers.

“The one exception to this is online brainstorming,” wrote Cain, “Groups brainstorming electronically, when properly managed, not only do better than individuals, research shows; the larger the group, the better it performs.”

Furthermore, recent studies on open-plan offices suggests that it reduces productivity and impairs memory, it makes people sick, hostile, unmotivated, and insecure. Another recent study found that people, after a quiet stroll through the woods, learn far better than walking in a noisier environment such as busy city street. Yet another study, of 38,000 knowledge workers across different sectors, concluded that the simple act of being interrupted is one of the biggest barrier to productivity, stated Cain¹. Scientists already proved we are incapable of multitasking or paying attention to more than one thing at a time. What looks like multitasking is really just switching back and forth between tasks–context switching–, which actually reduces productivity by up to 50% and can be mentally exhausting.

Words of advice from Stephen Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer:

Most inventors and engineers I've met are like me--they're shy and they live in
their heads. They're almost like artists. In face, the very best of them are
artists. And artists work best alone where they can control an intention's
design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other
committee. I don't believe anything really revolutionary has been invented by
committee. If you're that rare engineer who's an inventor and also an artist,
I'm going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is:
Work alone. You're going to be best able to design revolutionary products and
features if you're working on your own. Not on a committee. Not on a team.

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