Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can\'t Stop Talking pdfdrive com

partner of the advertising agency Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn
(BBDO), but it was as an author that he really made his mark, beginning
with the day in 1938 that a magazine editor invited him to lunch and
asked what his hobby was.
“Imagination,” replied Osborn.
“Mr. Osborn,” said the editor, “you must do a book on that. It’s a job
that has been waiting to be done all these years. There is no subject of
greater importance. You must give it the time and energy and
thoroughness it deserves.”
And so Mr. Osborn did. He wrote several books during the 1940s and
1950s, in fact, each tackling a problem that had vexed him in his
capacity as head of BBDO: his employees were not creative enough.
They had good ideas, Osborn believed, but were loath to share them for
fear of their colleagues’ judgment.
For Osborn, the solution was not to have his employees work alone,
but rather to remove the threat of criticism from group work. He
invented the concept of brainstorming, a process in which group
members generate ideas in a nonjudgmental atmosphere. Brainstorming
had four 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 the ideas of fellow group members.
Osborn believed passionately that groups—once freed from the
shackles of social judgment—produced more and better ideas than did
individuals working in solitude, and he made grand claims for his
favored method. “The quantitative results of group brainstorming are
beyond question,” he wrote. “One group produced 45 suggestions for a

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home-appliance promotion, 56 ideas for a money-raising campaign, 124
ideas on how to sell more blankets. In another case, 15 groups
brainstormed one and the same problem and produced over 800 ideas.”
Osborn’s theory had great impact, and company leaders took up
brainstorming with enthusiasm. To this day, it’s common for anyone
who spends time in corporate America to find himself occasionally
cooped up with colleagues in a room full of whiteboards, markers, and a
preternaturally peppy facilitator encouraging everyone to free-associate.
There’s only one problem with Osborn’s breakthrough idea: group
brainstorming doesn’t actually work. One of the first studies to
demonstrate this was conducted in 1963. Marvin Dunnette, a psychology
professor at the University of Minnesota, gathered forty-eight research
scientists and forty-eight advertising executives, all of them male
employees of Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (otherwise known as
3M, inventors of the Post-it), and asked them to participate in both
solitary and group brainstorming sessions. Dunnette was confident that
the executives would benefit from the group process. He was less sure
that the research scientists, whom he considered more introverted,
would profit from group work.
Dunnette divided each set of forty-eight men into twelve groups of
four. Each foursome was given a problem to brainstorm, such as the
benefits or difficulties that would arise from being born with an extra
thumb. Each man was also given a similar problem to brainstorm on his
own. Then Dunnette and his team counted all the ideas, comparing those
produced by the groups with those generated by people working
individually. In order to compare apples with apples, Dunnette pooled
the ideas of each individual together with those of three other
individuals, as if they had been working in “nominal” groups of four.
The researchers also measured the quality of the ideas, rating them on a
“Probability Scale” of 0 through 4.
The results were unambiguous. The men in twenty-three of the
twenty-four groups produced more ideas when they worked on their
own than when they worked as a group. They also produced ideas of
equal or higher quality when working individually. And the advertising
executives were no better at group work than the presumably
introverted research scientists.
Since then, some forty years of research has reached the same startling

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conclusion. Studies have shown that performance gets worse as group
size increases: groups of nine generate fewer and poorer ideas compared
to groups of six, which do worse than groups of four. The “evidence
from science suggests that business people must be insane to use
brainstorming groups,” writes the organizational psychologist Adrian
Furnham. “If you have talented and motivated people, they should be
encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest
priority.”
The one exception to this is online brainstorming. Groups
brainstorming electronically, when properly managed, not only do better
than individuals, research shows; the larger the group, the better it
performs. The same is true of academic research—professors who work
together electronically, from different physical locations, tend to
produce research that is more influential than those either working alone
or collaborating face-to-face.
This shouldn’t surprise us; as we’ve said, it was the curious power of
electronic collaboration that contributed to the New Groupthink in the
first place. What created Linux, or Wikipedia, if not a gigantic electronic
brainstorming session? But we’re so impressed by the power of online
collaboration that we’ve come to overvalue 
all
group work at the
expense of solo thought. We fail to realize that participating in an online
working group is a form of solitude all its own. Instead we assume that
the success of online collaborations will be replicated in the face-to-face
world.
Indeed, after all these years of evidence that conventional
brainstorming groups don’t work, they remain as popular as ever.