Questioning Conventional Wisdom
For the past few years, I've been making a concerted effort to question my own assumptions and the assumptions that our culture makes and presents to me. In so many places in life, when you directly examine the "conventional wisdom" about a given subject, it just doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
Over the last couple of weeks, this particular theme has been popping up (which is to say that I've just been noticing it where I've been looking) a lot. In many places, we seem to rely on what we *think* is true rather than actually investigating and determining what actually *is* true.
In many cases, this is because the conventional wisdom is something we're attached to. Take for instance, the idea of creativity. This old article on the myths of creativity (linked from Lifehack.org a couple of weeks ago) lists as #3 in their list the idea that creativity thrives under pressure.
I've heard that hundreds of times from all sorts of people, that they just do "better" work when their scrambling at the last minute. Heck, for a long time, I believed this one myself. The thing is that when you actually study creative output, it just isn't true.
Similarly, Marc Andreessen pointed out an analysis of the concept of "brainstorming" as a group. Again, if you analyze it rationally, having everyone in separate rooms coming up with ideas results in not only more ideas, but better ones as well than having everyone in a room.
On this one, I suspect that the "feeling" of brainstorming as a group gives the impression of higher productivity. It's probably also linked to the fact that in most offices, if you ask people to go to their desks and come up with ideas, they usually get bogged down in unrelated work. That doesn't change the facts, though. It just points to needing to handle brainstorming sessions in a more intelligent way.
Have everyone spend half of the meeting spread out coming up with their own ideas and then bringing them all together later. Don't send them back to their desks to get distracted. Just keep them on task, but brainstorming as individuals.
Some other conventional wisdom comes out and becomes pervasive because it's what we want to believe. A recent book, Myths of Innovation looks at one such area. We all (especially the press and blogs) want to believe in the idea of all innovation coming in that garage-in-the-wild-west, burning-the-midnight-oil, eureka-moment version of innovation. The truth is much less sexy. I'm not done reading this book yet, and have only been able to listen to a few minutes of this podcast interview with the author. However, all of it keeps resonating this same chord with me.
I'm definitely digging this trend, even if it's just that I'm finally noticing it. This stuff is striking me the way that Stumbling on Happiness did. It gets me in a mindset to think through my habits and the things that I take for granted. It makes me question my beliefs about practical matters like happiness, creativity, productivity, morality, work, etc. I like that.
It all feeds into the general approach to life that I've been taking lately which is that many of these issues require that you quit relying on the lower/older portions of your brain to make decisions and plan, instead using the top. That's mostly a debate between snap judgments and rationally examining a situation. It's clear to me how much of life comes down to the battle between the top and bottom of my brain.
