Study Suggests Too Much Collaboration Actually Hurts Productivity (inc.com) 49
An anonymous reader quotes Inc:
Our attention in the workplace is a precious resource that often falls victim to tools like email, Slack, and so on, which bring a nonstop supply of things to read, things to respond to, things to file, things to loop others in on, things to follow up on, and in general, things to do. This "always on" dynamic has roots in a desire for increased workplace collaboration and productivity, but as is so often the case, it turns out there is a balance to be struck for optimal results. New research shows that groups who collaborate less often may be better at problem solving....
In a study titled "How Intermittent Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence", the authors use a standardized problem-solving test to measure the contrast between time spent in collaboration mode against the quality and quantity of problem solving results. The group with no interaction predictably had the highest options for solutions, but those solutions were of lower overall quality. The group with high interaction had higher quality solutions, but less variety and a lower likelihood to find the optimal solution. The intermittent collaboration groups found the desirable middle ground to balance out the pros/cons of the no interaction and high interaction groups, leading them to become the most successful problem solvers.
The article warns of a "collaboration drain", suggesting managers pay closer attention to when collaboration is (and isn't) necessary. "Once upon a time in the land of business, people primarily communicated through conversations, meetings, and internally circulated printed memos. In the absence of email, Internet, cell phones, and CRMs there was a repeating cadence of connection, then disconnection, even while in the office."
"In this case, 'disconnected' really amounts to uninterrupted -- and able to focus."
In a study titled "How Intermittent Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence", the authors use a standardized problem-solving test to measure the contrast between time spent in collaboration mode against the quality and quantity of problem solving results. The group with no interaction predictably had the highest options for solutions, but those solutions were of lower overall quality. The group with high interaction had higher quality solutions, but less variety and a lower likelihood to find the optimal solution. The intermittent collaboration groups found the desirable middle ground to balance out the pros/cons of the no interaction and high interaction groups, leading them to become the most successful problem solvers.
The article warns of a "collaboration drain", suggesting managers pay closer attention to when collaboration is (and isn't) necessary. "Once upon a time in the land of business, people primarily communicated through conversations, meetings, and internally circulated printed memos. In the absence of email, Internet, cell phones, and CRMs there was a repeating cadence of connection, then disconnection, even while in the office."
"In this case, 'disconnected' really amounts to uninterrupted -- and able to focus."
Re: (Score:2)
Doesn't everybody know about the zone? (Score:4, Insightful)
https://dilbert.com/strip/2017... [dilbert.com]
Re:A shocking result (Score:4, Insightful)
On a side note, managers who try too hard (i.e., meetings, meetings, meetings, and more meetings) are worse than no managers at all. If you've never had a good manager, that's a pity because they're worth their weight in gold. The problem is that it's pretty difficult to find a person who has the necessary technical skills to be able to understand and contribute to a project along with the rest of the skill set that makes for effective management. Too often you end up with someone who's technically brilliant but deficient in everything else, or someone who might have some managerial chops, but no real knowledge about the technology or tools behind the project.
Scrum is worthless if mismanaged (Score:3)
Working Scrum environments are rare in my experience. For example, when a daily standup meeting goes 4-6 hours minimum, with everyone whining, "I'm blocked! Blame him!" and pointing fingers at someone else for every thing in their swim lanes, it gets old. Or a manager demanding to keep the dev team always in sprint mode, because marketing demands their deliverables that were already sold to customers, and the devs are always in a fire-fighting mode, trying to code something in place to make the customer
Two factors... (Score:4, Informative)
One is the very long and well recognized problem that communication is overhead.
Another is exacerbated by the communication problem, when faced with the depressing reality that you can't do things fast enough, businesses think more people == faster. In pursuit of this ideal, work is forcibly divided into uselessly small chunks, requiring insane amounts of coordination and utterly destroying individual competency across the product.
Re:Two factors... (Score:4, Informative)
Another is exacerbated by the communication problem, when faced with the depressing reality that you can't do things fast enough, businesses think more people == faster. In pursuit of this ideal, work is forcibly divided into uselessly small chunks, requiring insane amounts of coordination and utterly destroying individual competency across the product.
That sounds like Brooke's Law to me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Now, in a month, I will let you know if my team of nine women have been able to produce a baby . . .
Re: (Score:2)
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But I have noticed the effect itself. Too much interaction on, say, Slack can easily become as bad as a constantly-ongoing meeting... which is very bad indeed.
There have been times when I could wish my boss and others would just leave me alone so I could get my work done.
Re: (Score:3)
Mythical Man Month was published in 1975. And, yes, clearly, not much has changed.
Re: (Score:2)
9 women can have a baby in 1 month.
"Too Much" has little meaning (Score:1)
"Too much", air and water can kill you.
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Yes, it's annoying when people say "too much" of something is bad, because they forget the two magic words that contextualize that finding: it depends.
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The more time you spend talking about being productive, the less time you spend being productive vs hear the story about the woodsman that was taking to long to cut down trees because he could not stop to sharpen his axe. Choose and perish.
Kind of fits (Score:3)
"Search all your parks in all your cities, you'll find no statues of committees."
Well, except for this one, sort of... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
So basically committees are only useful when they’re volunteering to be executed.
Sounds about right!
Re: Kind of fits (Score:4, Funny)
There's the Mad Hatter's Tea Party in Warrington.
Just Say No To Meetings (Score:2, Interesting)
Every development position I've had, I spend the first 6-8 months building goodwill and trust. Exceeding delivery times, getting to know what's important to stakeholders, making sure everyone's input is (reasonably) utilized, and testing the hell out of things so they don't break. While those are, on their own, well and good, being on fire for 24 weeks is not my goal.
My goal, in actuality, is eventually avoiding 90% of meetings. The more I can create a sense of "he's on it", the more they leave me the
Re: Just Say No To Meetings (Score:2)
Studies show meetings lower intelligence and the ability to absorb new information, whilst increasing susceptibility to yes-man syndrome.
Why do you think academics avoid meetings in favour of symposia and conferences? (Basically the bazaar model, in ESR terms.)
The Oatmeal on quite the same thing, but close (Score:1)
https://theoatmeal.com/static/... [theoatmeal.com]
So wait. Just freakin' wait... (Score:2)
so you're saying... TOO MUCH inclusion is actually... a bad thing?
Better delete this post before the "alt-right" people use it to create a legion of super soldiers.
In otherwords, everyone in moderate America already knew this.
What's next, Contributor Code of Conducts is about adding more useless people to projects instead of maximizing productivity? Nah, that'll never happen.
Open Offices are the True Way to Collaborate (Score:1, Funny)
Developers shouldn't be using email, slack, ... to collaborate. They should all be sitting in a massive open office, working elbow-to-elbow with each other!
Coming up next: water is wet, air contains oxygen (Score:5, Insightful)
Coming up next: water is wet, air contains oxygen, men think dirty thoughts about women all the time.
I envy the chutzpah of "researchers" who got the grant for this. Any grunt from any megacorp which emphasizes sitting in meetings will attest that at one point or another they couldn't get _any_ work done while at work, and had to do it at home. I spent years working like this at MS in early 00's. Substantial portions of one of their most successful products were written by me on my Dell Inspiron laptop, from my couch in a tiny rented apartment in Redmond. Thank god for Remote Desktop. At work, we had 1:1 ratio between developers and PMs. PMs had to justify their existence, so they'd pester devs to write specs for features, then pass them off as their own work, and then rigidly schedule everything with arbitrary deadlines, and spend the rest of the product cycle "reporting status" to one another, and "managing" the bug backlog (which manifested mostly in "punting" bugs to v.next and releasing a buggy product before an artificial deadline). And of course they'd schedule an endless array of meetings to bikeshed over the most inane and immaterial bullshit, and they'd drag devs into those meetings too.
Google was heaven after this. Holy shit, I could actually get things done _at work_ (and easily 3x as much work, too), and not have to work weekends, and my team had a grand total of two meetings a week, and one of those was optional (a "chalk talk" to deep dive on new features in the product, or discuss interesting papers). No slack, no meetings, no "stand-ups", just raw, unbridled productivity.
This also has a good side effect: when it is expected that people would actually do significant quantities of high quality work, and not just bullshit all day, those who can't pull their weight leave pretty quickly, which has a multiplicative effect on the overall productivity.
Inefficiencies. (Score:4, Funny)
Rediscovery of Amdahl's Law in the Workplace Shock (Score:2)
News at 11!
Followed by our story on 60 people trying to put in a wooden post.
groups susceptible to group think (Score:1)
Meeting input (Score:2)
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Too many cooks... (Score:2)
Isn't this obvious? (Score:2)
The big lie in the headline (Score:3)
is they're placing organisational work flow under the title of collaboration.
Of course that's the case. (Score:2)
Too much collaboration hurts productivity (Score:2)
Well, there is this old saying: "Too many cooks spoil the broth"
Nuff said
Max DOP (Score:2)
Computers deal with this problem all the time, within their own circuitry. On one hand, it makes sense to split up the work among multiple processors or cores. But the more parallelism that is applied to a job, the more communication overhead is required. The trick is to find the right balance. That is why, for example, database servers let you set the maximum degree of parallelism--Max DOP--so that you get the optimal balance between multiple tasks being done at once, and not too much communication overhea
not Common Sense from a Manager's perspective (Score:1)
This finding wouldn't seem to be Common Sense for a manager (loosely defined...), whose major "tool" is communication, and to whom collaboration is seen as a way to get things done efficiently...
Common sense is continually conflated with "absolute and obvious truth", when in fact a given subject often has multiple facets, each with its own "common sense" perspective.