The Rise of the New Groupthink, Solitude on the Decline, Introversion in Web Developers and the Workplace

"...the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why the Internet has yielded such wondrous creations." (via @37signals)

I clicked through to the article linked by that Twitter quote this weekend, and saved the NYT article, "The Rise of the New Groupthink" to come back to later. Kottke linked to it today as well:

Susan Cain argues that the lack of privacy and freedom from interruption in modern offices might not be the best way for those office employees to be creative...particularly for introverts.

He quotes the article:

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.

I've been self-employed for 5 years now, and for most of that time have had personal office space to myself.

Providing client services, there's not as much freedom in self-employment as people often assume. The opposite is typically true. I have to be consistently available to clients, partner agencies and my team of contractors. Between this and 2 young children at home, when I work is not something I have a lot of control over. Where I work and what my workspace is like is, and that's very important to me. I've sat in an office that I've rented, alone, and still worn noise-canceling headphones to attain solitude.

My oldest son, age 4, shows strong introverted traits as well, and I see him struggle with this. He processes discoveries and thinks things through internally, revealing his conclusions on his terms. He needs space & downtime to process things. He excels at solo tasks, like learning to read. Seeing this as a documented long-term trend makes it all the more troubling. It's not just me.

Marcel Proust called reading a “miracle of communication in the midst of solitude,” and that’s what the Internet is, too.

I came across the article via 37signals, a successful web-based software company that blogs frequently about how they work. Oftentimes when I read about their geographically-diverse team, flextime arrangements, collaboration over minimal overlapping time periods, and how those contribute to their success, I think, "You're just a bunch of introverts."

And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extraverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic.

This shows a misperception about introversion. Introverts can be quite capable of speaking prolifically, one-on-one or to large groups, about ideas and topics they're invested in. "Exchang[ing] and advanc[ing] ideas" are not exclusive to the extravert end of the scale. It's small talk, unnecessary interactions and noise that distract, and exhaust, introverts -- Exactly the sorts of things that persist in an open workspace.

And we must recognize that introverts like Steve Wozniak need extra quiet and privacy to do their best work.

The Introvert Advantage is a great book if you're an introvert or are close to an introvert. It examines biological differences in the brain when introverts & extraverts process situations and emphasizes understanding strengths and weaknesses to better structure your life accordingly.

But it’s one thing to associate with a group in which each member works autonomously on his piece of the puzzle; it’s another to be corralled into endless meetings or conference calls conducted in offices that afford no respite from the noise and gaze of co-workers. Studies show that open-plan offices make workers hostile, insecure and distracted.

Sounds just like the way people behave in traffic. I rent an office within walking distance from our home, in large part to avoid starting and ending my day contending with traffic.

Another article that popped up recently (via @shawnblanc) was "Solitude and Leadership":

Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.

Even if we establish private space as important for creativity, physical solitude as important for thought, even if we turn down the noise in our real space, we have to keep the distractions in our virtual space at bay as well.

That how we work is as important as the work we do is a recurring theme here. It's part of that gap in preparedness for successful work and collaboration. "The Rise of the New Groupthink" just scratches the surface on a lot of topics -- globally, nationally, in the workplace, in education, and in my own life. Clearly the attention I've seen this article receive is coming from like-minded folks. Over time, however, there's a lot of work and opportunity in this space to be more successful, more productive and happier with the work we're doing.