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Meetings Make You Dumber
Maximum Prophet writes "Robert Heinlein once said that the committee was the only life form in the universe with three or more bellies and no brain. MSNBC reports that his statement may have some statistical truth to it. Researchers are finding that meetings are actually bad places to be creative. You're not actually 'dumber' when you're in the meeting, just more likely to lose your creative edge. Studies have now shown that, as collaborative primates, the more often a possibility is mentioned the more likely the group is to go along with it. Individuals placed by themselves were more likely to come up with imaginative alternatives to products, for example."
Zonk must have been in a meeting...
...I just happen to be sitting midway through an all day brain storming session on service mangement.
I can feel my brain atrophy.
----------------------------
Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
Meetings Make You Dumber... Researchers are finding that meetings are actually bad places to be creative. You're not actually 'dumber' when you're in the meeting, just more likely to lose your creative edge.
Sounds like someone wrote this writeup while in a meeting...
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
The point of the article wasn't that meetings are bad. The point was that group think at meetings is bad. The example they gave was that if people go off and develop a list of ideas on their own, the combined list of ideas is longer than if people develop a list of ideas together in the group.
There are two points that are important here. First, a group of people is likely to develop more ideas than a single person regardless of whether the group develops the ideas together or separately. Second, when it comes to choosing one idea from the list of many possible ideas, a well organized group is going to make a better choice than a single individual. In fact, the biggest problem in a poorly run group is that one person makes all the decisions so it is equivalent to a single individual make the choice.
That was basically the point of the article: for a group to be effective it needs to be organized to allow everyone in the group to have input.
Their function is to seek consenus, bring us all up to speed, get everyone reading from the same page, allocate division of labour etc.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
is that in private corporations there is no way to give a eral opionon and not be fired if it isn't what the boss had envisioned.
The boss want's hoola-hoops with razors on the inside? then you better be a team player and commit 125% to that goal.
You think it's dangerous? not a team player, get out
You think there isn't a market? not a team player, get out
you mention that 100% is pretty much all someone can give without physically harming them selves? not a team player, get out
Forgot to clean the fridge?not a team player, get out
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
let me just say, "Well, duh!"
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
It's called "Group Think" and it was a major factor of evidence in the destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia. We've already read this, been over this, and done this. Is this a presentation of a new idea, or an idea restated in a new light?
Either way, it's always a good idea to realize that in most cases, people are in a situation to satisfy themselves first, then those who are most related to that self next.
I find that in meetings I lead, I spend more time chairing the discussion than growing the actual discussion from the seeds of creation. Group think tends to be the by-product of that one person in your meeting who wont let go of their own idea and continues to bludgeon the group into submission.
If we're talking about a room with a table and a bunch of office guys around it with the boss/supervisor/whatever blabbing on about "analysing reports from 1st quarter blah blah", you're bound to go numb. :)
"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson
Just one loong meeting...
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Meetings by themselves don't have problems. It's meetings that are flawed.
1. Meetings that should never have been held. They serve no real purpose.
2. Meetings with no structure, and no one to lead them
3. Meetings where there is an agenda but no one follows it and no one guides it
4. Meetings that run overtime due to mismanagement and no one is willing to conclude it.
5. Meetings that start late because there is no respect for the time of the attendees.
These are just some of the things that make me dread meetings. Over the last 6 years out of the many meetings I've been obliged to attend maybe five were really useful.
There are few things more frustrating to me than so-called "brainstorming sessions". "Let's get a bunch of smart, creative people together and bounce ideas off each other." It never works. Never.
Anytime you have more than two people at a time trying to go through this process, you invariably get tied up in social motivations that are detrimental to the outcome. People are afraid to offend. People try to impress. People are afraid of sounding stupid.
The best and most useful creative ideas always come from individuals or occasionally pairs. Not committees.
Best Windows Freeware
Meetings.
Guys --
I just scanned this great article on MSNBC..Let's have the whole team meet at 4:30, I've got some ideas...
--The Boss
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
A single stupid idea will gain traction at a meeting if enough people are apathetic about it.
If we keep meeting like this we could lose our status.
That would explain a lot of stuff I see and read on the Internet.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Studies have now shown that, as collaborative primates, the more often a possibility is mentioned the more likely the group is to go along with it.
I'd have to agree with that. What do you think?
"the more often a possibility is mentioned the more likely the group is to go along with it."
9 -11...
Iraq...9-11...Iraq...9-11...9-11...Iraq...Iraq...
While I certainly agree with the general conclusions drawn in the article about large groups or meetings in the traditional sense, I find that a single person working alone can sometimes also be fairly unable to come up with new ideas due to working from only a single perspective. Unless of course they meant have these people working alone for the brainstorming, and then have them come together and pick the best ideas and implementations from the bunch.
I think there may be a certain critical mass where enough (creative) people are in the room to come up with ideas from different perspectives, and enough cooperation and teamwork is in the room for the best ideas to rise above the ones that are simply said with the most volume and frequency. Of course I think the likelihood of getting the right sorts of people together with the right amount of self-awareness and ego to be able to admit when they don't have the best idea, is probably nothing short of a minor miracle for a company. I know there are people with whome we are more creative as a team than separately, but that is due to our experience and already established compatibility. The chances of us ever finding ourselves in the same company at this point are pretty slim.
Certainly the groups one finds in a typical office meeting are not the slick and well-tuned creative machines that me and my friends have developed on our own, and certainly those sorts of meetings are the bane of all intelligent and productive people's corporate existences.
When employees know which way the boss is leaning, how many feel safe calling him a dope?
I remember when it actually WAS that way at Microsoft, because everyone was respected, and you could tell your manager that his idea sucked, so long as you had a better one and could PROVE it verbally and demonstrate it in code.
These days, opposition to the bosses' idea is a fast track to unemployment.
Companies that are succeeding today hire well, then turn their people loose to solve problems their own way. You just tell them where you want to end up, and let them drive.
You have to have secure management for that, and this is a rare thing these days.
Let me recommed the book, "How to Run a Successful Meeting in Half the Time" http://www.amazon.com/How-Successful-Meeting-Half- Time/dp/0671726013/sr=8-7/qid=1172256632/ref=sr_1_ 7/102-8911026-2154546?ie=UTF8&s=books, It's a quick read, and does have good advice.
The author gives the an example of a good meeting, the opening of the old TV show, "LA Law", where the lead attorney came in, laid his pocket watch on the table, then asked everyone to bring him up to speed with what they were doing. The pocketwatch was a device to let the audience know that he valued his time. Always, the meeting was over by the first commercial break. If real life corporate meetings could be more like this, I think we'd get a lot more done.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
I have a fakey "inspirational" poster in my cubicle with this expression quoted at the bottom. A wise investment of $13 that is now empirically proven to be true.
Thats why I bring my laptop with me and do work, mostly ignoring the discussion, nod a few times, say "Mmm-huh" and then 10 minutes before the end actually listen to the conclusion and ask who the hell came up with a plan like this.
And for our next trick, we'll prove that water is wet.
From what I've seen, the best projects/products in terms of actual value and progress (not popularity) tend to be the ones entirely controlled by one person. The Linux kernel is an excellent example. It outshines the capabilities of the Windows kernel in so many ways it's not even funny. And it's all under the watchful eye of the benevolent dictator Linus Torvalds. It could even be said that early Apple computers under Steve Jobs' guidance was progressive for similar reasons. All of the "asshole" myths from the 70s and 80s about him indicate that he was still highly involved in controlling the direction of Apple products and pretty much defined what Apple was before he was ousted. Now, if you want the APPEARANCE of progress and value, then you can use committees, consultants and most specifically nice shiny PR to make people THINK you're "the shit". But in reality, you aren't. Sadly the reality based world is not a place people want to live these days.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I held a meeting on this and we did not understand.
Linux O Muerte!
Along with Powerpoint and crystal meth, it sounds like some of my co-workers might be in trouble.
After much discussion we have decided to comment on this absurd proposition that a group cannot write anything creative. Towards responding to this accusation, we propose a set of action items which will form a roadmap for our final response which will be distributed and posted to Slashdot by next Thursday afternoon.
The first action item will be to define what "creativity" actually is. This issue will be discussed at a CD meeting (Creativity Definition Meeting) tentatively scheduled for Monday at 9:45 am. Donuts and coffee will be served.
The results of the CD meeting will be compiled into a compelling Powerpoint presentation and displayed at our weekly Status Meeting on Wednesday at 4:30pm. Please note, we'll all be going out for drinks promptly following the meeting.
Thursday will consist of a full day of intensive focus groups, follow up discussions, and satellite meetings which will put a fine point on the issue of our supposed inability to generate new and compelling ideas. That full day of meetings will be compiled in a pink sheet for distribution to top management prior to our official Slashdot response.
Thank you.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
How else would Fox "news" have any influence over people's opinions?
If you don't buy what I'm saying. Just keep reading it over and over until you understand it.
if they had a meeting to come up w/this study... Maybe they could've reached another conclusion individually... ;)
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne
Effective leaders have known this at least since the Bronze Age.
You do all the creative work, all the organizing,
all the planning and "getting one's ducks in a line"
_before_ the meeting. You talk to all the important
participants, sound them out, and introduce your ideas,
_before_ the meeting.
Then you hold the meeting to review and ratify.
For a picture of an effective leader playing this game
at the grandmaster level, see the second volume of
Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon B. Johnson,
_Master_of_the_Senate_.
Wait a minute. Didn't I say that on the other side of the record? I'd better check
Your boss just called. We're having a breakout session at lunch to determine what to do about all this brain atrophy. There will be lettuce and cheese sandwiches with generic food-service chips. See you there!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
But the Reality is that most meetings suck, are mis-managed and a waste of time. Why these things are true does not matter. They are and they aren't going to change.
So, avoid meetings as much as possible. Use email and the telephone and finally, talk to people in their cubicles/offices. Use the one-to-one means of communicating as much as possible. People will give you more information and more SENSITIVE information in person than they will in a group.
Once you have all of that and you've run through the email/telephone/cubicle cycle a few times, then call a short meeting to make sure that everyone sees everyone else agreeing in public to what they've agreed to.
Meetings suck. Avoid them.
Ironically this article popped up on Slashdot just as I loaded it onto my laptop at the beginning of a two hour team meeting. On top of that, I just ate McDonald's.
I agree with the article. I believe the cloudy feeling that comes over me during meetings is probably due to the lack of mobility, several people in the same room trying to share oxygen, and psychological factors such as disinterest, disconnect and general boredom. I have been to very few interesting meetings, so I can imagine that people don't want to brainstorm during a typical meeting. I brainstorm best when it's a small group or I'm alone, and when my alertness is high. Meetings tend not to foster such an environment, and the room is darkened to help with the visibility of projection. It's just not good for thinking.
Mods, mod parent offtopic.
To those people with a basic understanding of human personality, this conclusion is obvious. The basic point here is that introverts are not able to function at their highest ability in real-time, face-to-face groups. Duh. . .
It is interesting to note that in some other cultures, (like France, for example) introversion is respected and placed on an equal footing with extroversion. In the US, and in prevalent US-dominated world culture, extroversion is pushed almost exclusively as the norm. Most introverts are forced into physical spaces (cubicles) and interactions (meeting rooms) with lots of other people around. This leaves an introvert drained and unable to function at their highest ability. Also, the general expectation for most interactions is for real-time discussion (face to face or by phone) where extroverts have a distinct advantage solely because if their ability to respond faster verbally. Email is a notable exception to this in generally accepted practice, where the introverts have a distinct upper hand.
Note: when I use the words introvert and extrovert here, I am not talking about the colloquial social definitions, nor the psychological disorder (maladaptive, overt) introversion, but rather the psychological typing used by MBTI, Keirsey, and other systems.
Dumb teammates make you dumber. Incompetent bosses make you look dumber. Big Macs make your ass fat.
what's a sig?
"Meetings: No one person is as stupid as all of us."
Well, it's a close approximation to the poster. Alternatively:
Neither I nor U are in Teamwork.
I write some of my best code during long, dull meetings.
I even seem very active to the other participants, constantly taking notes on my laptop (as far as they know).
so let me get this straight... you take a bunch of people and put them in a box (a meeting room) and have some expectation they will think "outside the box"? Um?
being around other people introduces an enormous set of implicit norms and expectations. most people follow all these norms completely unconsciously.
The same idea repeated thousands of times by thousands of search results. Billions of people grouped together. A handful of sources providing all the original information. Sounds like a description of the internet. Did humans get less creative when they created the internet?
The last thing you would want is to increase the creativity of Congress...
Many posters have brought up the concept of groupthink, which also seems to me to be a separate issue. Groupthink has more to do with people being reluctant to come up with/bring forward alternative solutions when the majority of the group has already settled on a decision.
Essentially I'd say that the issue of problem-solving individually vs. in groups is vastly more complex than can be explored with such a simple experiment. As the article mentions, the study may argue in favor of advertising during events that people watch as a group, but that's about as far as it goes.
Still trying to think of a clever sig...
The primary purpose of meetings is to achieve consensus or to efficiently communicate information to the people who need it, not to be creative. The rest of your time on the job is the time to think of ways to effectively solve a problem. A meeting is for taking those ideas and throwing them out there, and seeing whose idea sticks.
Honestly, if a group of supposedly well-educated people couldn't think of a solution to a problem on their own, multiplying their inability won't magically make 0+0+0=1
It's been a long time.
Unsurprisingly, both the Slashdot and TFA headlines are misleading. What the article really says is the whole idea of a brainstorming session is, to be blunt, bullshit. This isn't classic groupthink, per se, which has more to do with an overemphasis on agreement and congeniality squelching dissent in teams, leading to false consensus. Instead, our evolutionary heritage of social behavior means that we're more likely to discard our own ideas in favor of anothers, especially if that other is someone we look up to or perceive as a leader. So in a group situation, once a few ideas are thrown out it's hard to get any further new ideas because people will self censor themselves as "dumb," or worse not even consider anything else because they lose the thread in favor of paying attention to what's on the table. Hence, brainstorming is a complete waste of time.
A better solution is to procede in rounds, where people do their creative thinking alone, then meet to coalate ideas, then go back off to perform creative synthesis on this new set of ideas alone, and so forth. Of course you still have to deal with groupthink when it eventually comes time to evualate competing options and select winners, but that's really a seperate issue with its own set of pitfalls.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
We should have an online town hall meeting to discuss whether this is truth or not.
IMO it's true, meetings require consensus building and 'LCD' communication ( least-common-denominator)--which usually takes up 75% of the meeting's time. So there's little chance anything creative comes out of it.
Meetings are only as smart as the dumbest person attending.
isn't pair programming just one long meeting ;-P
Meetings can be used for several secondary things, but the true functional effect of meetings is forming social bonds between co-workers who would otherwise never associate. Social bonding makes workers identify with their co-workers as a team and not just a work-group. 'They' become part of the tribe to form 'Us'.
"But the Reality is that most meetings suck, are mis-managed and a waste of time. Why these things are true does not matter. They are and they aren't going to change."
I couldn't have said it better. The truth is that most meetings I've attended, most mandatory, are a waste of time. They are simple management tactics that make their managers think everyone is working as a team, when they usually have no topics for discussion.
However, I disagree that a meeting of multiple people will invariably lead to a waste of time and make all more dumb just for being involved. Maybe bored, but I guess I can 'escape' with my imagination when I can. Really, some people just collaborate better in-person.
It's always been my understanding that the greatest fear that people have is talking in front of a large group (like giving a speech) --often, I have found that people will _not_ give their true opinion in a group because of fear. Fear of being chastised or ridiculed in front of your peers usually ensures that people would rather 'go with the flow' rather than 'rock the boat'. Usually, the strongest personalities 'win' at these types of meetings where few challenge contrasting ideas with their own.
One thing I know is that meetings, called brainstorming sessions, are crucial to some types of businesses. Creative businesses are primary. Many I know in the creative arts are very gregarious and meetings are a time to also relax and get to know others. However, I also worked for a university for many years in IT. There is no need for a weekly meeting that lasts one hour. Most people there didn't like to be in a group, even of their peers. They are loners, like many in that field, who don't like talking to people that much. It's almost like putting the nerd class in this situation is actually physically damaging to them. So, I can see why many could say that meetings are a waste of time, but to make one dumber?
That quote about committees sounds more Douglas Adams than Robert Heinlein...
No sig for you! Come back one year!
.... they say that naps boost your IQ.
Have gnu, will travel.
An old joke, but appropriate here:
How do you determine the IQ of a committee?
Take the average IQ in the room and divide it by the number of people in the committee.
Heinlein was a Navy man IIRC and I'm sure has FAR greater insight to the nature of committees and meetings. As far as being a waste of time, that is absolute crap. Now, while the majority of meetings I have been through were crap, they weren't crap because they were mandatory meetings, they were crap because they were held by people being managers and not leaders. There is a distinct difference, and to think that you can just hold a meeting and get stuff done is stupid. It takes training just like everything else. You have to be trained to conduct effective meetings, you have to be a leader and not a manager.
One of those irritating things I have noticed is that technical oriented people will discount managerial behaviour out of hand rather than looking at the individual. There are hordes of ineffective managers being hired with no real leadership qualities or capabilities. Work for someone who has strong leadership traits, has had good leadership training, and you simply won't fear meetings anymore. When I have worked for this type of person I have actually looked forward to a coming meeting. You get to provide status information, collect status and ideas from other sections, and get a good direction and any change information and sent back to work. If handled by a competent leader your meetings will actually keep your team on track better and things will get done with fewer mistakes or last minute changes.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Unfortunately, many meetings _are_ a waste of time. But this isn't due to the nature of meetings; bad meetings result when the organizer doesn't know how to facilitate. With the right group of people, meetings can be productive and creative. Comedy writers, for example, can come up with some funny stuff when they're sitting in a room bouncing ideas off each other. Long, bad meetings show that the person in charge is disorganized. For the most part, meetings should be short and sweet. Set a goal for the meeting, accomplish it, then move on. If you need to brainstorm, let people work in pairs for a few minutes, then discuss the ideas as a group.
Sorry, just out of meeting. Did I miss anything?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://despair.com/meetings.html
Game... blouses.
So what is the affect of meetings centered around PowerPoint presentations?
http://despair.com/meetings.html
"Meetings: None of us is as dumb as all of us"
People learn to act creative. Some of us do manage to learn how to do it, usually alone. It's hard to learn to be creative in a competitive environment. When I was in public school in the 1970s-80s, the curriculum included special training for the "smart kids" in brainstorming. Practicing builds those skills. Not just being creative oneself, but much more of the activity in the group is helping others create ideas without stepping on them. Offering an idea is risky, because it's often wrong, which can discredit you, costing you social power, if even one or a few others in the group are competing.
So while this study might show that "meetings make you dumber", or that we act dumber in meetings, that doesn't have to be true. If we don't just accept it, we can learn to do a lot better. And since "meetings" just means "collaboration with other people", we have a lot better we can do. Better than we can alone, if we get it right.
--
make install -not war
Meetings are going to happen. It's really tough to avoid them so you might as well have a plan for when they occur.
When I am in charge of making a meeting happen I try to use this little trick: Everyone has X amount of time before the meeting, usually in days. At that meeting be ready with 3 solutions to the problem, and rebuttal arguments for why #1 and (hopefully) #2 were mentally scrapped by the time you figured out option #3.
Now the meeting rolls around and I have say 5 people all ready to go with up to 15 different answers, but before we've even started most of those have been rejected.
We'll still cover all the solutions so we can weed out duplicates, shoot down people's third choice that someone else already thought of and realized a shop stopper ("...And that's why this idea will work." "Well, it would work, but where are we going to get tights in our size at this time of night?"), and correct any assumptions for people's self-realized blockers. ("At first I thought we could do this, but we need Marketing's help and they're buried." "Actually, Marketing just finished our last major project so we have a few days breathing room to help out.")
This keeps the "group think" out of the process until later in the process when the playing field has already narrowed down to 2-3 solid ideas.
I've found that I'm more creative in meetings for two reasons:
1) I bring my notebook and completely phase out the meeting. The best new ideas come to me that way
2) If you're with a small group of creative people (2-3 max) who are on the same wavelength with you, you might get some synergy. We called this "Crack Smoking" at my old job. (As in: hey, take a whiff of the pipe and consider THIS idea...).
The answer may be meeting lunches (where you go out and casually discuss stuff).
[as opposed to lunch meetings whose sole purpose is to suck the life out of people faster]
Title: "Learn The Language Of Math"
Text: "...from first principles. Metamath does not claim to teach you mathematics, just as..."
From Metamath (around that time): "The choice of title for this story, "Learn The Language Of Math," was unfortunate and was the Slashdot editor's, not mine."
Some things never change...*tags story "confictingtitleandsummary"*.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
If you gather a relatively manageable group of people (up to 10) in a room with a projector, and you work through the meeting with a clear agenda and take visual notes using Mind Mapping software (http://www.mindjet.com/), I've personally experienced a tremendous gain in productivity, as people tend to collaborate better when they have a visual representation.
The poster misquotes Heinlein. The correct quote is: "A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain." -Lazarus Long, from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long.
has anyone responding to this post actually seen the research in
question? i bet most posters to slash/dot are not regular readers
of the particular journal where it was published, so all they have
is the flimsy report of the research. please look at the study first
before violently agreeing with it. just because it is called "research" and
is published and happens to match some people's experience or expectations
[see spolsky for a recent dose of the latter] does not make it good,
accurate, or predictive.
-- nous
Usually, the strongest personalities 'win' at these types of meetings where few challenge contrasting ideas with their own.
You nailed it with that. It's not so much fear of being chastised or ridiculed, as being shouted down. When the same egomaniacal blowhards make a federal case over any little thing that deviates from their own way, they get their way every time, because the rest of us are just tired.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
"The size of a group is inversely proportional to its intelligence."
Give it a whirl, see if you disagree. The occasions on which you enable a large group to behave intelligently, are the occasions on which you buy property in Aspen, CO. Not easy.
I think this sums it up pretty well.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Heinlein actually said committees were creatures with three or more LEGS and no brain, not bellies (which makes no sense).
I like attending meetings at my job.
Makes me feel at least slightly important when I get asked to attend and it takes me out of the tedium of my day to day tasks. Regardless of if the meeting was productive or not I still get paid so it doesn't affect me in the slightest.
You're all fired
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVM5amHJ_94