Great New Yorker article on collaborative work
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Will Bennis, Locus Workspace
Feb 15, 2012, 12:47:11 PM2/15/12
to Coworking
Jonah Lehrer wrote a nice piece for the New Yorker on successful and
unsuccessful group collaboration: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lehrer.
It's mostly empirically driven and provides some nice support for what
most of us want to believe and have anecdotal evidence for.
The main thrust of the article is that "brainstorming"--a somewhat
systematic method for generating creative ideas that specifically
promotes improv like generation of ideas without criticism or
censoring, most recently championed by IDEO among others--does NOT
work, and primarily because the critical/debate part of group dialog
is a really important part of creative insight. But other parts of the
essay--to me--are more important with respect to coworking.
The bad: remote collaborative working has large potential costs if the
goal is high-level innovative collaboration. He cites research, for
example, that looked at the geographic distance between scientific
collaborators as that correlates to things like the number of
citations the publication received or the judged importance of the
collaboration. Physical proximity plays a surprisingly large role. Of
course, that isn't necessarily bad for coworking, but I often hear
coworking advocates suggesting that the traditional office is dead and
suggesting that coworking allows remote workers all the benefits and
then some of working with ones' actual same-company collaborators, and
findings like this at least suggest that unless people who are
collaborating are working out of the same coworking space, it's hard
to beat a shared office with people who are working on the *same*
project.
The good: Open and interdisciplinary workspaces that promote chance
encounters and communication spur creative insight and success. In
sum: use coworking for your small teams to work together, or as a
remote worker only if non-remote work is not an option.
The article is worth a read. Would love to hear others' thoughts about
it.
Will
unsuccessful group collaboration: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lehrer.
It's mostly empirically driven and provides some nice support for what
most of us want to believe and have anecdotal evidence for.
The main thrust of the article is that "brainstorming"--a somewhat
systematic method for generating creative ideas that specifically
promotes improv like generation of ideas without criticism or
censoring, most recently championed by IDEO among others--does NOT
work, and primarily because the critical/debate part of group dialog
is a really important part of creative insight. But other parts of the
essay--to me--are more important with respect to coworking.
The bad: remote collaborative working has large potential costs if the
goal is high-level innovative collaboration. He cites research, for
example, that looked at the geographic distance between scientific
collaborators as that correlates to things like the number of
citations the publication received or the judged importance of the
collaboration. Physical proximity plays a surprisingly large role. Of
course, that isn't necessarily bad for coworking, but I often hear
coworking advocates suggesting that the traditional office is dead and
suggesting that coworking allows remote workers all the benefits and
then some of working with ones' actual same-company collaborators, and
findings like this at least suggest that unless people who are
collaborating are working out of the same coworking space, it's hard
to beat a shared office with people who are working on the *same*
project.
The good: Open and interdisciplinary workspaces that promote chance
encounters and communication spur creative insight and success. In
sum: use coworking for your small teams to work together, or as a
remote worker only if non-remote work is not an option.
The article is worth a read. Would love to hear others' thoughts about
it.
Will
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