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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html
Groupthink
By SUSAN CAIN
New York Times
January 13, 2012

SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

But there�s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They�re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They�re not joiners by nature.

One explanation for these findings is that introverts are comfortable working alone � and solitude is a catalyst to innovation. As the influential psychologist Hans Eysenck observed, introversion fosters creativity by �concentrating the mind on the tasks in hand, and preventing the dissipation of energy on social and sexual matters unrelated to work.� In other words, a person sitting quietly under a tree in the backyard while everyone else is clinking glasses on the patio, is more likely to have an apple land on his head. (Newton was one of the world�s great introverts: William Wordsworth described him as �A mind for ever/ Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.�)

Solitude has long been associated with creativity and transcendence. �Without great solitude, no serious work is possible,� Picasso said. A central narrative of many religions is the seeker � Moses, Jesus, Buddha � who goes off by himself and brings profound insights back to the community.

Culturally, we�re often so dazzled by charisma that we overlook the quiet part of the creative process.

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Thank you very much for sharing that.

Bravo! I enjoy the luxury of working in solitude from my home office four days per week. I'm in our corporate office only on Mondays. I accomplish almost nothing on any given Monday.

Lawyers still get offices.

However, the practice of law isn't particularly correlated with innovation.

Unless you want to count innovative lawsuits.

Lawyers can be quite creative there.

The times where I need to be most creative and productive is when there's a system outage. And wouldn't you know it, that's also when every manager wants to bother me.

You would not believe the circus I endured today.

Whats a Friday without some dancing dogs and an elephant shot out of a cannon?

My DH recently seems to have found his ideal environment - a truly functional distributed team. They have their daily standup via video chat, have a team chat channel running as needed and each work at home doing their thing mostly alone. And managers wanting updates on outages can read the appropriate internal chat channel instead of pestering.

Butter (DD8) often draws attention to herself with her refusal to join. Last year, lunchtime would often find her hiding by the "book share" cart, instead of on the playground. Her teacher seemed bothered by this, but not me...in Girl Scouts, when we are doing crafts and the other girls have grouped themselves, she tends to pull off to the side or edge of the group...

Funnily enough, she is our top cookie seller, go figure...

I think it really bothers ADULTS that such a "bright girl" isn't more into socializing, but my DH is quite the same. He's super funny, really, but not into being in the spotlight...

I myself am also having problems working with a group of other adults...it takes too much time and overthinking to stroke their egos...

I think it depends on the task. An engineer that designs an assembly line in isolation, usually creates a problem for the actual workers performing the task. When Ford put engineers and workers together, they ended up with less medical problems -- since the workers were not in difficult positions attaching something -- better productivity and higher quality.

When Apollo 13 was in distress, it wasn't a bunch of engineers in isolation that came up with a solution under the time constraint, but the group working together in a room where they could quickly take apart an idea to see if it would work.

There is that a-ha moment that a scientist will have, as he sits in isolation, but it is usually after he has gathered the information from all kinds of sources and it finally gels in his brain.

I get my best ideas when I am running in the morning. I have that time to see it clearly and figure it out. But the compilation of information didn't get there in isolation.

I think the whole introverted, in isolation is out of context.