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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."
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.
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.
Which meetings? For which purpose? Are you developing a new product? Are you in an IT team producing a support document for users? Are you a research scientist trying to track the work of your assistants, or talking with investors? Are you part of a legal team?
I know there's an IT and/or software development/engineering lens through which a lot of Slashdotters view the world. But many of the assumptions don't migrate to other contexts well. A receptionist, an IT tech, an industrial designer, and a financial analyst all have very different relationships to meetings, information, and creativity.