The Rise of the New Groupthink

Susan Cain

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.

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I dont care how fast people are connected; nothing moves faster than information among neurons in one person’s brain. Yes to all hi-tech tools to collect, process information in a pull mode, but no to always-on constant communication that are essentially jerk circles rather than idea generating mechanisms. With “pull” we mean communication being initiated by the creator whenever s/he prefers it.