[HN Gopher] Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation
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Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation
Author : hammock
Score : 97 points
Date : 2022-10-13 14:26 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| ThalesX wrote:
| > Our data suggest that this physical difference in shared space
| compels virtual communicators to narrow their visual field by
| concentrating on the screen and filtering out peripheral visual
| stimuli that are not visible or relevant to their partner.
|
| Yeah... how about creative idea generation gets written down
| somehow and expanded? I've yet to find in my life, a _worthwhile_
| creative idea, that can 't be written down for dissemination and
| expansion. What I have found is snake oil peddlers that like to
| hear themselves speak and throw around 'creative' ideas that get
| lost in a sea of dialogue.
|
| > Here we show that virtual interaction uniquely hinders idea
| generation--we find that videoconferencing groups generate fewer
| creative ideas than in-person groups due to narrowed visual
| focus, but we find no evidence that videoconferencing groups are
| less effective when it comes to idea selection.
|
| I don't disagree with the results of this paper, but I disagree
| with the premise that creative idea generation is something that
| should get done in a physical huddle.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| In my experience the best ideas come about when a group of
| competent people each go off on their own and think deeply
| about a problem, then talk to each other afterwards about what
| ideas they have. Often good ideas, particularly to complex
| problems, come about as fusion of a couple good idea-lets.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >Often good ideas, particularly to complex problems, come
| about as fusion of a couple good idea-lets.
|
| This has been the case in my experience as a researcher. My
| collaborators and I tend to have various seeds of ideas that
| aren't much more than just "it could be interesting to look
| at X." But when we sit down at a bar to shoot the shit around
| some drinks, that's when those ideas combine into something
| really promising, and we feed off each other's excitement.
| Hard to have that in a virtual setting.
| [deleted]
| incrudible wrote:
| Let's skip straight to the actual data:
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04643-y/tables/2
|
| The way I see it, even if this data isn't just noise, the
| difference is negligible. Moreover, generating slightly more
| ideas isn't necessarily valuable. Most ideas are worthless
| distractions. Curiously, some of the data suggests that _the
| virtual team_ picked the better ideas, but again, the difference
| is negligible.
| Mathnerd314 wrote:
| It seems they have sufficient data points that the difference
| in the means is significant even with high variance. For
| example, take "number of creative ideas" because it has the
| largest Cohen's d besides the gaze measurements. Doing Welch's
| t-test to compare and assuming the virtual/physical were evenly
| split (not reported), the statistic is (14.74-16.77) /
| sqrt(6.23^2/150 + 7.27^2/150)=2.6 and at 75 degrees of freedom
| that's something like p=0.03, still pretty significant. In the
| paper they use a negative binomial distribution because the
| distributions are significantly non-normal and get a lower
| p=0.002. Then in the field studies with 745 more pairs they get
| pretty much the same results. So overall the statistics seem
| fine and they probably found a replicable effect.
|
| The more likely issue is garbage in, garbage out - their study
| design is really not that great, e.g. the time taken to switch
| between the screen and the tablet could be the cause of the
| difference.
| chewbacha wrote:
| yea, that's how I read it too. Those standard deviations are
| pretty wide.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Actually, one thing I have found has benefit is switching to
| async idea generation.
|
| The power of a group chat where people discuss ideas as they
| occur is really powerful.
|
| Many times in an in-person whiteboard session, you may not fully
| explore the ideas or people who are not comfortable jumping in
| get ignored.
|
| An async idea generation session often sees a wide variety of
| ideas explored as well as more in-depth exploration as people can
| think about ideas more and cross reference sources. In addition,
| it is easier for someone who may be more introverted to put out
| their ideas.
|
| Also this takes advantage of the just got an idea in the shower
| or while doing a long run phenomenon.
| adverbly wrote:
| As others have said, the researchers got close but missed the
| mark here.
|
| If you're trying to innovate while staring someone down on a
| video call, you're doing it wrong. Get a white boarding app.
| They're better than real world whiteboards in many ways, although
| not as great in others.
|
| I'd love to see a follow up study with proper screen sharing
| environments.
| seydor wrote:
| > we instructed each pair to generate creative uses for a product
| for five minutes and then spend one minute selecting their most
| creative idea.
|
| This is published in Nature, why? it's a very narrow definition
| of "creativeness" . Such claims have a mountain to climb.
| Scientists have been doing remote work for decades, it's not like
| all the creative stuff happened in attention-deprived
| conferences.
| [deleted]
| bdbenton wrote:
| Who could benefit?
|
| Popular "debate" in the news cycle, scientific authority based
| on crude subjective judgment, interests of capital.
|
| This sort of viral bad science is something you would expect
| from reddit but not from hackernews. I suspect this site is
| becoming more like the former.
|
| To be clear, I'm not making claims on whether or not remote
| work is more or less creative.
|
| Just highlighting the point that bad science that fits a
| certain popular trend in online media gets clicks and
| engagement.
|
| Comments like yours get little to no engagement because it
| actually addresses the article and is not an empty anecdotal
| debate for entertainment.
|
| What makes this site intellectually engaging is that it is
| text-focused and doesn't host porn. It is much better at being
| what reddit wanted to be, but I think it it is "crossing the
| chasm" which is a term I learned here.
|
| I think it is time to log off for good and get back to work.
| This sort of thing enough of a reason. Do not want to waste
| life scrolling.
| blueyes wrote:
| Virtual interactions are tied to screens. That's their weak
| point, because screens affect our vision, how we move and focus
| our eyes.
|
| Our eyes are the only part of our brain exposed to light and air.
| It turns out that how we move and focus them affects the rest of
| brain function.
|
| Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist at Stanford, has researched and
| spoken about this deeply and at length. Here are three podcast
| episodes where he dives in:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObtW353d5i0
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqCEOJSvgwA
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ze2pc6NwsHQ
|
| I think all three points in these comments can be right: 1) we
| need alone time; 2) sharing physical space can help creativity;
| 3) virtual meetings can hurt it.
|
| But we have to isolate the variables. Shared physical space for
| creative sessions doesn't have to mean open offices, and it
| doesn't have to mean eliminating solitude. We should also allow
| for different people responding differently to virtual meetings,
| shared space, etc, and remember to consider this statistically,
| as the scientists do. That is, we should try to segment the
| subjects of the study. Some will prefer screens more, some shared
| space.
|
| The tech industry remains willfully and obtusely ignorant of the
| costs of virtualizing human interaction, because people sitting
| in a room together don't need much software, and nobody's going
| to build a unicorn on that.
|
| As with long covid, the true and persistent costs of these
| changes -- virtualizing everything -- will only become apparent
| in the years to come.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Virtual interactions aren't tied to screens. That's the first
| thing people need to stop associating.
|
| Gamers have done this stuff without wasting screen estate for
| decades. It's the office culture which tries to push video both
| ways, which creates a vastly different dynamic. It's crazy how
| researchers largely ignore these subcultures doing just fine.
| blueyes wrote:
| Phone calls barely merit the name "virtual interactions."
|
| But in any case, when people are working remotely, the vast
| majority are using audio _while they look at a screen_ ,
| which underscores my point.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Those gamers are still tied to screens.
| TwoCent wrote:
| True. But the focus is entirely different. Gamers interact
| while engaged in a task: the task is the focus, and
| communication happens through speech or text. Playing a
| game and communicating via Discord is a pleasure. Contrast
| that with a meeting on Zoom or Teams, and the focus shifts.
| If the screen is filled with little videos of other people,
| it's mentally exhausting in a way gaming isn't.
|
| I think online meetings I had 10 years ago, where we'd
| share a desktop but it was voice-only for all participants,
| were easier on everyone than the current Hollywood Squares
| presentation of most online meeting applications. Those are
| mentally and emotionally taxing in ways that gaming is not.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Glad you noticed. Now extrapolate to other activities which
| are not tied to screens, such as... virtual conversation.
| We've actually done this for decades too: telephones.
| Radio. Etc.
|
| The joke here is, gamers are less tied to the screen than
| most video call participants feel or even are. That while
| one requires near-constant focus on the screen, and the
| other doesn't.
| bumbledraven wrote:
| "I do basically no videoconferencing. Screensharing is great,
| and critical. But typically I find video distracting." -
| Stephen Wolfram
| (https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-
| prod...)
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| I'll be honest in my experience a good idea comes from an
| individual who has an insight or sees a vision others can't.
|
| I've noticed these ideas can get refined and filtered by group
| discussion and can go from good to great, but for me at least
| personally I don't feel like I can come up with good thought out
| ideas without spending extra time to think through them and
| understand them.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Linux of course suffers as a purely virtually developed software
| product a profound lack of creativity apparently.
| lumost wrote:
| Linux is not purely virtual, it is distributed. Many hardware
| companies employ kernel dev teams. There are multiple venues to
| sync-up across dev teams to brainstorm new ideas in kernel
| development.
| twelve40 wrote:
| it was most certainly not virtually developed while becoming
| relevant. if you want to build your house getting inspiration
| from burj dubai, go for it.
| jacknews wrote:
| "when it comes to selecting which idea to pursue, we find no
| evidence that videoconferencing groups are less effective (and
| preliminary evidence that they may be more effective)"
|
| Personally I've rarely seen really good ideas actually generated
| in a meeting, they are usually brought in by people having a
| revelation at the coffee machine or whatever, and then chosen,
| possibly refined in meeting.
|
| So in fact, contrary to the headline, remote could be the ideal;
| people bring in ideas from their much more diverse experiences
| working remotely, and a video conference is a better way of
| selecting which idea to pursue.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| This does seem to imply a new heuristic - ideate in-person, but
| make decisions over tele-conference.
|
| It will be interesting to see what telepresence tech can do to
| overcome the screen-dependence issues of modern remote work for
| creative work.
| sho_hn wrote:
| > This does seem to imply a new heuristic - ideate in-person,
| but make decisions over tele-conference.
|
| This is more or less consciously what we ended up doing in
| remote-first companies I've worked at. Work remotely, but
| gather twice a year for at least a week to reflect, bond and
| gather/develop the ideas we'd take into the next interval. At
| one of them we did this for close to a decade, with 20-30
| people living all over the planet. I'd say overall this
| works, and certainly has generated a string of fond memories
| ("do you remember the one when we came up with ...") for many
| involved as well. The point of coming together is not so much
| to get intense work done, and more to discuss and make plans
| and see what happens.
|
| It's also how we roll in the KDE open source community with
| the annual conf and the irregular sprints and project-
| specific gatherings.
|
| At my current company, we were 200 in a building designed for
| 250 at the start of the pandemic - and now we're up to 800
| people, still with the same building. We effectively ended up
| remote-first by logistical necessity, but we use the office
| for workshops and some cross-functional meetings (we're also
| building a large new campus for thousands, though).
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| My team noticed this during lockdown, we make a point to do all
| creative discussion IRL now.
| gz5 wrote:
| idea generation being measured as an output of 2 strangers
| brainstorming on a random product seems too distant from the
| scenario in which most creative ideas are actually created.
|
| my experience in real-world enviros:
|
| + no single variable is dominant across all
|
| + trust can be important and often is easier to build in-person
|
| + pairs or teams with trust can innovate over any medium
|
| + a degree of randomness can be helpful and feels underrated to
| me. it can help us see through blind spots, assumptions, or
| biases which we didn't realize we had by taking a conversation to
| a place in which we may not have otherwise taken it, or making us
| think through a problem in a different way. this randomness can
| come from many places, including 'outsiders' (experts in other
| domains is great, but so are newbies)
| [deleted]
| danielvaughn wrote:
| This has been my experience and I don't understand it.
| Technically speaking you have the same capabilities on a zoom
| call - you can see their face, talk to them, use a virtual
| whiteboard, etc.
|
| But by the end of it you just feel spent, and the creative energy
| just isn't the same as being physically present.
| m000 wrote:
| > Technically speaking you have the same capabilities on a zoom
| call - you can see their face, talk to them, use a virtual
| whiteboard, etc.
|
| Technically speaking, you don't. Physical whiteboards are much
| more efficient in quickly scribbling your thoughts for everyone
| to see than a virtual whiteboard driven by keyboard and mouse.
| uptownfunk wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: for innovation and creation which requires
| collaborative team work - especially in early stages of a
| project/product - nothing better than being together collocated,
| but once you're in execution mode (requirements finalized, now
| build) much better to be at home. I can't stand having to
| transport to the office, but once I'm there there is nothing
| better
| shakezula wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. There really is something unique about
| being in a room with a big white board, a few tough problems to
| solve, and lunch on the table. I've done my best work in those
| situations and I'm looking forward to when my job looks like
| that again.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| Well, this paper will be a rallying point for every RTO manager
| out there.
|
| And Meta will end up using as a tool to promote metaverse
| interactions.
| oldstrangers wrote:
| Probably the article's entire reason for existing.
| Garlef wrote:
| Judging from the abstract, the title should be actually be
|
| "Videoconferencing curbs creative idea generation".
|
| There's more to virtual communication.
| [deleted]
| Daishiman wrote:
| I've found most experienced teleworkers like myself rarely use
| video conferencing for remote work. When I need to work on a
| creative idea it's much easier to grab the phone, put earbuds
| on, and sit in the garden to walk and think, or take a walk in
| the street, or get myself in whatever comfortable position. If
| there's anything to share it will most likely be a screen with
| code or text, which is functionally the same as sitting with
| someone side by side except with all the personal space you
| can't get otherwise.
| sposeray wrote:
| zerotolerance wrote:
| In other news, Nature would like you to return to work where
| you'll be so creative under the florescent lights in your super-
| cubicles and open floor plans.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| I am careful to use the term "Return to long commutes and work
| from the office" as "return to work" implies that working
| remotely is not "work".
|
| I believe you meant the former - this is my tiny PSA about the
| importance of framing and phrasing.
|
| Similarly "quiet quitting" is a frame further normalizing
| employee exploitation. "Working within contractual obligations"
| defangs that one.
| lbrindze wrote:
| I do the same thing, but insist on calling all regular
| weekends "short weekends" and holiday weekends "regular
| weekends" or just "weekends". My hope is this catches on and
| we start thinking of 5 day weeks as "long weeks". (given that
| I stole this from a podcast producer maybe it already is?)
| gclaramunt wrote:
| the "big office real estate conspiracy" is in full swing... So
| many articles shilling for going back, but the genie is out of
| the bottle now.
| lioeters wrote:
| > Publisher of Nature (journal) - Nature Research (subsidiary
| of Springer Nature)
|
| ---
|
| > Springer Nature - Owners: Holtzbrinck Publishing Group
| (53%), BC Partners (47%)
|
| > In 2017, the company agreed to block access to hundreds of
| articles on its Chinese site, cutting off access to articles
| on Tibet, Taiwan, and China's political elite.
|
| ---
|
| > Holtzbrinck Publishing Group is a privately held German
| company based in Stuttgart which owns publishing companies
| worldwide. ..The history of Georg von Holtzbrink's publishing
| activities during the Nazi years 1933-1945 has been
| controversial. ..In 2015, it merged most of its Macmillan
| Science and Education unit (including Nature Publishing
| Group) with Springer Science+Business Media.
|
| ---
|
| > BC Partners is a British international investment firm with
| over $40 billion of assets under management across private
| equity, credit and real estate in Europe and North America.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Study is full of easily poked at holes.
|
| Pairs were assigned at random and the study was short. That alone
| could create bias in favor of in-person. It also ignores many
| real life settings not working in pairs, but larger groups at
| dedicated moments while stuffed with solo work otherwise
| (retrospectives and sprint planning say hi).
|
| Pairs interacted with a single 15 inch screen. I mean, come on.
|
| Focus was primarily on _video_ , then extrapolates to the
| entirety of virtual (audio-only exists too).
|
| >By contrast, we found preliminary evidence that decision quality
| was positively impacted by virtual interaction. In-person teams
| had a significantly higher top-scoring idea in their generated
| idea pool
|
| This seems far more important than it's given space for, too.
| What good is quantity in the face of quality and bias?
|
| Disclaimer: I do personally believe in-person to have more
| potential, but this ain't it chief.
| [deleted]
| acd wrote:
| You could have a video conference while outside in nature. Or you
| could be traveling to a different country. Most book authors work
| "remote" which is creative.
| profstasiak wrote:
| they don't work remote, because they work alone
| Mathnerd314 wrote:
| Last I checked, there were studies like
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221...
| that touted the importance of (solitary) individual time for idea
| generation. And the virtual communication enhanced idea
| selection. So the only lesson I get from this is that continuous
| virtual communication is overdoing it, but that a mix of virtual
| and alone time is probably better than all the stupid in-person
| meetings.
| Loughla wrote:
| My take is that it's the same lesson we've already known. You
| need time alone to brainstorm independently, and you need to be
| more in-person to use those ideas as a team to be creative.
|
| But the main takeaway is that everyone should consider every
| meeting. Is it necessary. Should it be virtual or in person. IS
| IT NECESSARY.
|
| But, again, I feel like that's always been a thing.
| chaxor wrote:
| I think what we learn from this study is that scientists are
| great at showing their hypotheses to be true, no matter what
| they may be. So if two groups have opposing hypotheses, both
| still get published, the differences only show up in the raw
| data, and the nuisances are then explained away in the
| discussion. If it has to do with something as flimsy as
| behavior, you should put very little trust in the
| conclusions.
| bee_rider wrote:
| There of course could be all sorts of clever statistical
| explanations for two experiments coming up with conflicting
| results, but a simpler explanation seems to be that these
| two hypotheses aren't in direct opposition.
|
| The abstract of the first says:
|
| > Our results suggest that virtual interaction comes with a
| cognitive cost for creative idea generation.
|
| and the abstract of the second says
|
| > Three experiments were designed to test the efficacy of
| ideation procedures that involved alternation of individual
| and group idea generation sessions (hybrid brainstorming)
| as compared to traditional individual and group ideation.
| [...] The results of the experiments support the original
| suggestion by Osborn (1953) that the most effective
| brainstorming process is one that involves a variation in
| individual and group ideation.
|
| This all seems to fit what common sense would have us
| believe, right? A mix of alone and group time helps,
| virtual group time isn't a perfect replacement for in-
| person group time for some tasks.
| oliwary wrote:
| > we demonstrate that videoconferencing hampers idea generation
| because it focuses communicators on a screen, which prompts a
| narrower cognitive focus.
|
| I wonder what including virtual reality in the study would have
| resulted in. I feel like being surrounded by a shared
| environment, and (in the near future) seeing facial expression
| and gaze tracking might make VR a better environment for idea
| generation.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| Ah yes, let's arm middle management and corporate executives who
| already barely go into any office themselves with more propaganda
| for them to present as half baked evidence that everyone should
| be back in office.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| This is just middle management and landlord propaganda porn. I
| have never been as creative when I'm not being disturbed by
| office noise and gossiping office mates.
| marysnovirgin wrote:
| 100%
| bigbacaloa wrote:
| Doesn't pass the smell test.
| sandGorgon wrote:
| _> By contrast, we found indications that virtual interaction
| might increase decision quality.
|
| >Virtual pairs selected a significantly higher scoring idea (M =
| 4.28, s.d. = 0.81) and had a significantly lower decision error
| score (M = 0.78, s.d. = 0.67) compared with in-person pairs_
|
| works for me.
| civilized wrote:
| The experiment is interesting, but the interpretive claims made
| in this article extrapolate well beyond what the evidence
| actually shows. It reads like a mediocre university press release
| about the research, except it's the actual research article
| itself that is making uncritical, overgeneralized claims about
| what it showed.
|
| My comments on the abstract:
|
| > we show that videoconferencing inhibits the production of
| creative ideas.
|
| No. _At most_ you showed that people doing videoconferencing in
| 2022 have less creative ideas on average than people in a shared
| physical space in 2022. You didn 't show that videoconferencing
| is the unconditional, eternal, inherent, invariant _cause_ of
| this.
|
| > we demonstrate that videoconferencing hampers idea generation
| because it focuses communicators on a screen, which prompts a
| narrower cognitive focus.
|
| No. _At most_ you showed that communicators using
| videoconferencing in 2022 focus more on a screen, which prompts a
| narrower cognitive focus. Why do the communicators do that? Did
| the videoconferencing _force_ them to focus on the screen? You
| didn 't demonstrate that, and it's probably not true.
|
| Maybe we have bad social norms around how videoconferencing is
| used because we have not had sufficient time to develop and
| spread best practices. Maybe we feel obligated to sit very still
| and stare at each other's faces, when we could instead have a
| shared norm that it's OK to stop doing that and focus on our
| tasks while on the call. Maybe we should feel free to turn the
| camera off from time to time (Slack huddles _default_ to video
| off, a gutsy and visionary choice). Maybe we should feel free to
| pace around the room, like some of us might do in a physical
| space. Maybe we need to set each other free to be humans when
| speaking to each other virtually, rather than reducing each other
| to motionless bodies that exist to present stationary faces on a
| screen.
|
| We need to look at the _interaction between the technology and
| our social norms_ before we jump to the conclusion that some
| aluminum and silicon _forces_ us to behave in certain ways and
| that we are _helpless_ to do otherwise.
|
| If you had to guess, what kills human creativity? An inanimate
| object made of metal and glass that makes pictures and sounds if
| you ask it to... or social pressure -- which could be explicit
| and external or implicit and internalized -- to conform to
| behaviors that kill creativity?
| seti0Cha wrote:
| Good points. I find myself wondering whether everyone was
| equally affected. I don't always stare at the screen during
| video calls. I do when I'm trying to communicate, but when I'm
| thinking I do what I do in person - I stare off into space. I
| think this is fairly common. Looking at a person's face, you
| are getting all kinds of information, even when they aren't
| speaking. When people are concentrating, I think they often
| look at their notes, at the ceiling, out the window. The
| problem may simply be that some people don't understand that's
| ok in a videoconference format.
| jdlshore wrote:
| Interestingly, this matches what Bjorn Freeman-Benson said in
| 2019, before the pandemic. He's a CTO with a lot of experience
| with remote development:
|
| > Due to communication friction, "we got much less creativity out
| of our [distributed teams] at InVision," Bjorn said. "We had to
| overstaff to get the same amount of creativity. In other words,
| if communication was 80% as effective, we'd have to hire 30% more
| people." Communication friction didn't necessarily affect
| productivity, but it did affect creativity. And in InVision's
| startup environment, creativity was key.
|
| He calls it "The Friction of Communication Problem." There's more
| in the article:
|
| https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/blog/2019/three-challenges-of-...
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