2006/02/08
23:04:50

Geeks and meetings

I was reading Why do we still believe in group brainstorming? and it hit me that this is basically why geeks and meetings don't get along. The basic premise is that people feel that the time is more productive when in a group because of the more continuous ideas. Combine this with a mind heavily oriented towards logic, and you end up reducing the ideas such that lots of discussion is not equivalent to actually producing stuff. Add in the social aspects of things like it being rude to go off ignoring everyone on your own brainstorming, and trying to keep people in sync and evaluating together rather than independently expanding and filtering and bringing only at least semi-evaluated things back, and you get the opinion that it's a complete waste of time.

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By Joebuck on 2006/02/09 at 11:47:23

I liked that article. My summary would be "in a group, you can see how bad other people are at coming up with ideas so you don't feel so bad about how few ideas you came up with". Nice :)
Reminds me of a qoute

By Kruck on 2006/02/09 at 12:41:57

Good find. I think that they should realize that groups (epically large ones) are rarely used to come up with ideas and more to refine an idea or debate between a set of ideas (at least in my experience). If you are coming to a meeting without some ideas prepared in advance then you are not prepared, if you have a whole staff / team do that then you have bigger problems. That said I used to work with a really small team at that did all of our design together and it worked really well. It was one of those situations that just clicked; I haven't seen anything like it since.

By Jeremy on 2006/02/09 at 18:43:57

For the group that worked well, I think it's probably a result of a few factors. Trusting each others ideas so not having to evaluate the sanity of it each time, having a reasonably set goal (a design meeting certain criteria), and being at approximately the same level of knowledge. Eliminate any of those and everyone spends half their time keeping figuring out if it's the right direction or trying to correct others.

And yea, coming to meetings without ideas is bad. Its even worse when you have meetings where you have no idea what the real goal is and there's not a good way to find out. Those are the ones that seem to take several meetings just to get a single meeting that can actually do something set up.

By jeff on 2006/02/10 at 08:31:05

This reminds me of the recent meeting that the Twins had with certain members of the MN Legislature. The only thing accomplished was that they agreed to have another meeting. What a joke.