Group vs Solo work for an asymmetrical creative process
When diverging, expanding the scope, collecting proposals and rebounding on others ideas it’s clearly an advantage to have a group.
A group is more diverse, has multiple worldviews, beliefs and viewpoints and the more they are, the better it is (until reaching a certain size after which adding people will not really change the group dynamic).
When converging, reducing the scope, making decisions, priorizing, selecting and sorting, it can sometimes be better to have a very small group and even to do it alone. This can be more efficient while providing a better outcome.
“Decisions are always made in committees with an odd number of people, and three people is already too many.” — multiple authors
It’s easy to put a mess as a group, as nobody has a real expectation about how it should look like at the end. This is not true anymore when it’s about reducing the entropy and building a solution out of chaos, because here we each have a projection of what it should look like once the work is done.
Seth Godin’s today post provides a good view on this phenomenon and a possible way to solve it.
