[There's] a very long and well-established literature in psychology that getting groups of people together is no way to come up with ideas. Creativity is not a team sport. What you're looking for is somebody's individual, intellectual trunk to make new connections and come up with something new.
Let's imagine billions of neurons in my head communicating with stuff they've been talking about all their lives together: there's a high probability that occasionally they'll come up with something new. Let's now think of the line of communication that you and I have got between each other, which is impoverished, because we have to try and translate complex ideas into language, and how many times do you find you've got a good idea, it's almost in symbolic thought inside your head, and you really can't articulate it to someone. And when you do, they get the wrong idea, because really, language can't encapsulate it until it's fully formed. There's no good evidence that I know of that these brainstorming sessions will come up with a solution or a new idea.
The difference in rates and understanding of our internal and external informational exchanges is particularly crucial, as noted in the passage quoted above. It's far too easy for bad or extraneous inputs to derail the creative process.
John Cleese has a great video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
Again, not that there aren't useful concepts, and his anti-creativity measures strike me as valid.
> "If we don't, the executives, like high school kids, will try to bluff their way through a meeting,"
Bezos meetings solve the problem of people not reading the material at all, not the problem of not thinking about the problem.
The point of the meeting is not to create new ideas or solve problems. Either the presenter has the solutions or ideas written down or not. Every meeting has a decision maker. The purpose of the meeting is there to make a decision at the end. If there are still open questions, then the decision-maker assigns one or more people to research, and the needed follow-up. At the end of the next meeting, the decision is made.
First thought was "I'll have the answer in six months," when the problems are really understood. No offer on that one, haha.
By 11PM, there was a leading idea, and I took time to think about everything. I questioned everything. Everyone was pestering me, the leader of this event, to acknowledge this was a fantastic solution.
I asked stupid questions, I asked great questions, I took time to think, I measured things, and I got crap for it. Someone even said I drank too much, which had nothing to do with my skepticism.
My conclusion-
>Group think took over badly
>others werent thinking, they gave answers like- 'You Just....' without thinking about how difficult each of the tasks. Or 'Thats not a big deal'.
>Non engineers will not be invited in the future, the gf of an engineer (who is a psychologist) was very persuasive on her idea.
I couldnt believe how strong group think was, it was unanimous. The next morning we woke up and realized the idea wasnt great.
I'll take being a slow thinker.
That only works if you have lots of closely related experience so that the solution is trivial to you anyway, or if you're a genius. Most of the time you end up with shitty "knee-jerk" software that focuses on technical details way too much instead of solving the problem.
I'll think about it, maybe do some experiments / proof-of-concept, then we can talk about it again, then I'll think about your input, and then we can discuss the tasks and sub-tasks once things are starting to make sense.