Stata Center Gets Respect August 17, 2010
Posted by keithsawyer in Organizational innovation.Tags: frank gehry, james russell, stata center
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One of my very first blog posts, back in June of 2007, was about MIT’s Stata Center, a striking building designed by architect Frank Gehry. People either loved it or they hated it; that blog post was titled “the building that threw up on itself.”
Now an architecture critic, James S. Russell, has written a glowing review in Bloomberg News, saying that the critics were wrong. He went back to interview the scientists and administrators who had been working in the building all these years, and “all deemed the building a success.” Here’s what else Russell said:
Walk with me through the ground-floor “student street,” a popular campus shortcut with ramps circling overhead, lit with shardlike skylights. You are likely to see people talking over laptops or scribbling on blackboards. Symposia often spill into the hallway as passersby stop to see why the chatter is so animated. Up a level or two, Gehry all but banished hallways. You move past lounges, open two-story seminar spaces, and eddies of whiteboard-equipped space often occupied by impromptu collaborators.
Stata’s beehive quality is intentional. At the furthest edge of research, working within the old disciplines no longer makes sense. Gehry’s team designed a building of laboratory “neighborhoods” to support communities of researchers. At Stata, linguistics, artificial-intelligence and computer scientists work together, but more boundaries need to be crossed. Stata throws people together so that every researcher has a shot at encountering the person he never thought of who turns out to have a skill that’s needed.
In my 2007 blog, I was also enthusiastic about Gehry’s building, and for the same reasons–it was designed to foster collaboration. I’m glad to read that its occupants have experienced that.
Competition Makes Groups More Creative August 17, 2010
Posted by keithsawyer in New research.Tags: group competition, markus baer, team competition
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I just read a study by my Washington University colleague, Markus Baer, and three other authors* in the latest issue of the Academy of Management Journal. They start out by citing a history of prior studies showing that when you have different groups compete to reach a goal, the effectiveness of the groups goes up. That’s because the external threat gives a group more coherence, and a greater sense of a shared goal–two of the important properties of what I call “group flow” in my book Group Genius. But no studies have ever specifically focused on group creativity as the potential outcome of competition.
They brought together groups of four undergraduate business majors and asked them to generate ideas “to make the university more attractive to students” by focusing on two areas: the transition from high school to college, and how to improve the quality of life on campus. The researchers had a panel of three graduate students rate all of the ideas for novelty and usefulness. Then they created three different competition situations, by varying the amount of the award for the best ideas ($4, $40, or $400) and the percentage of teams that would get a reward (top 50 percent, top 10 percent, only the top team).
The results: as they increased the intensity of the competition, the rated creativity of a team’s ideas increased. So it seems that a little bit of competition can actually enhance group creativity.
(Also see my post about the Netflix Prize)
*Baer, M., Leenders, R. T. A. J., Oldham, G. R., & Vadera, A. K. (2010). Win or lose the battle for creativity: The power and perils of intergroup competition. Academy of Management Journal, 53(4), 827-845.
Groups are Better than Individuals August 9, 2010
Posted by keithsawyer in New research.Tags: cooperative groups, letters-to-numbers problems, Patrick Laughlin
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If you’ve read my 2007 book Group Genius, you know about the research showing that brainstorming groups perform worse than a comparable number of solitary individuals, working alone. Groups typically generate half as many ideas as the pooled ideas of the solitary individuals.
But most of what groups are asked to do in the real world is a lot different than simply generating lists of ideas. There are many studies showing that on more complex tasks, involving knowledge of conceptual systems, groups perform better than individuals. One study* I just read today compared solitary workers to groups of 2, 3, 4, and 5, on their ability to solve a simple codebreaking task: the individual or group was told that the first ten letters of the alphabet each corresponded to one of the digits, and they had to figure out the mapping by proposing mathematical equations to the experimenter (like A + B = ?) and the experimenter gave the answer in letters. Groups of five typically solved all ten letters in 6.83 guesses–which requires them to figure out that if they use multi-digit equations in a clever way, they solve the answer faster: EED + ECD + EFG = ? This was faster than the best of five comparison individuals. Groups of four and three were also faster than the fastest of a comparison nominal group. Statistically, there was no difference in the performance of groups of 3, 4, and 5.
The performance of groups of two was statistically identical to two people working alone–suggesting that you need at least three people to get the benefits of group dynamics, but adding more above three doesn’t give you an additional benefit–at least, for this particular task.
*Laughlin, P. R., Hatch, E. C., Silver, J. S., & Boh, L. (2006). Groups perform better than the best individuals on letters-to-numbers problems: Effects of group size. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(4), 644-651.
