Posts Tagged “productivity”

Large brainstorms can be fruitless

0Ross • 26th Apr 2010 • Living • meetings, productivity, work

A colleague points me in the direction of research that large brainstorms can be fruitless. Highlights from the original research (in her summary):

“There is considerable evidence that group brainstorming is less productive than individual brainstorming”. Explanations for this “productivity deficit” include “social matching… a tendency to conform to peers” and “social loafing… because responsibility is diffused”. The researchers focus on a third , viz “collaborative fixation” — “Exchanging ideas in a group reduced the number of domains of ideas that were explored by participants. Additionally, ideas given by brainstormers conformed to ideas suggested by other participants.”

As she mentions, the experiments were conducted using computer terminals (presumably to enable the researchers to control the environment) and so it’s not clear how face-to-face interreaction would have affected the result.

So what should you do if you find yourself in a timesuck meeting like this? Doodle.

Create your own economy

0Ross • 12th May 2009 • Learning • books, economics, productivity

Tyler Cowen, of Marginal Revolution, is trailing his new book, Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World, on the infographic blog Wehr in the World. From what I can gather, it seems that the focus of this book will be on organising your mind like an internal economy. This begins to sounds like David Allen’s Getting Things Done (‘GTD’) system. However, one of the obvious benefits of the Tyler Cowen approach is that Tyler’s almost super-human information gathering and processing speed is obvious from his blogging. So there has to be something in it. I’m looking forward to this book.