their lives in solitude. Hence leadership does not only apply in social situations, but
also occurs in more solitary situations such as developing new techniques in the arts,
creating
new philosophies, writing profound books and making scientific
breakthroughs.
The New Groupthink did not arise at one precise moment. Cooperative
learning, corporate teamwork, and
open office plans emerged at
different times and for different reasons. But the mighty force that pulled
these trends together was the rise of the World Wide Web, which lent
both cool and gravitas to the idea of collaboration. On the Internet,
wondrous creations were produced via shared brainpower: Linux, the
open-source operating system;
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia;
MoveOn.org
, the grassroots political movement. These collective
productions, exponentially greater than the sum of their parts, were so
awe-inspiring that we
came to revere the hive mind, the wisdom of
crowds, the miracle of crowdsourcing.
Collaboration
became a sacred
concept—the key multiplier for success.
But then we took things a step further than the facts called for. We
came to value transparency and to knock down walls—not only online
but also in person. We failed to realize that
what makes sense for the
asynchronous, relatively anonymous interactions of the Internet might
not work as well inside the face-to-face, politically charged, acoustically
noisy confines of an open-plan office. Instead of distinguishing between
online and in-person interaction, we used the lessons of one to inform
our thinking about the other.
That’s why, when people talk about aspects of the New Groupthink
such as open office plans, they tend to invoke the Internet. “Employees
are putting their whole lives up
on Facebook and Twitter and
everywhere else anyway. There’s no reason they should hide behind a
cubicle wall,” Dan Lafontaine, CFO of the social marketing firm Mr.
Youth, told NPR. Another management
consultant told me something
similar: “An office wall is exactly what it sounds like—a barrier. The
fresher your methodologies of thinking, the less you want boundaries.
The companies who use open office plans are new companies, just like
the World Wide Web, which is still a teenager.”
The Internet’s role in promoting face-to-face group work is especially
ironic because the early Web was a medium that enabled bands of often
introverted individualists—people much like the solitude-craving
thought leaders Farrall and Kronborg describe—to come together to
subvert and transcend the usual ways of problem-solving. A
significant
majority of the earliest computer enthusiasts were introverts, according
to a study of 1,229 computer professionals working in the U.S., the U.K.,
and Australia between 1982 and 1984. “It’s a truism in tech that open
source attracts introverts,” says Dave W. Smith, a consultant and
software
developer in Silicon Valley, referring to the practice of
producing software by opening the source code to the online public and
allowing anyone to copy, improve upon, and distribute it. Many of these
people were motivated by a desire to contribute to the broader good,
and to see their achievements recognized by a community they valued.
But the earliest open-source creators didn’t share office space—often
they didn’t even live in the same country.
Their collaborations took
place largely in the ether. This is not an insignificant detail. If you had
gathered the same people who created Linux, installed them in a giant
conference room for a year, and asked them to devise a new operating
system, it’s doubtful that anything so revolutionary would have occurred
—for reasons we’ll explore in the rest of this chapter.
When the research psychologist Anders Ericsson was fifteen, he took up
chess. He was pretty good at it, he thought, trouncing all his classmates
during lunchtime matches. Until one day a boy who’d been one of the
worst players in the class started to win every match.
Ericsson wondered what had happened. “I really thought about this a
lot,” he recalls in an interview with Daniel Coyle, author of
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