Their hypothesis is that "virtual communication hampers idea generation because the bounded virtual space shared by pairs narrows visual scope, which in turn narrows cognitive scope". It seems to me the human mind is far too complex to predict the effects of such simplistic parameters, but it's still food for thought, so to speak. I personally find Zoom/Teams meetings to be soul deadening but I'm a restless, attention-deficit kind of person to begin with and I hate meetings in general.
What gets the creative juices flowing probably varies from person to person, but likely reducing interaction to a small window is low on that list.
Look at the findings on https://researchbox.org/282 (Forward Flow row), they didn't timestamp the ideas. I'd like to know in which order the ideas were generated.
My gut is that for any ideation activity, individuals will have an initial set of ideas, and communicate this (whether spoken, or as jotted notes in the conferencing tool's chat). Those will have the earlier timestamps.
Then there are "spin-off" ideas, which you usually have more of in a face-to-face context, which will have the later timestamps.
I'd would have also liked to see if idea A inspired idea B, so a tree of ideas.
What I'm getting at: I'd like to check which of the "initial" or "spin-off" ideas were the "best" ideas. From experience, the initial ideas folks come up with usually spring from their prior experience, which means it's usually based on tried-and-trusted ideas which came before.
Also, I think it depends on the group: maturity, experience, etc. I generally hate big group discussions, and you inevitably have some in the group who dominate discussions. What I prefer is getting a meeting agenda ahead of time so I can come in prepared. Bonus if attendees can send their preliminary thoughts via email ahead of time. That will ensure that any verbal discussion is to the point, summarised, and leave room for any last-minute questions.
E.g. I would love more meetings to be like this one (involving Richard Feynman; he uses the phrase "great men", but I prefer "great people"):
After having thought about this some more: all projects differ, all teams and individuals differ.
I agree, if there's a big "sprint 0" idea push that needs to happen, I'm all for get-togethers. But once that's out of the way, I prefer remote work for various reasons, as the task list is known, and I can crack on without interruptions.
Then there are all sorts of things we can do for the smaller ideation instances that pop over over the product development lifecycle, like setting meeting agendas, having folks send their notes ahead of time, and using the actual meeting to finalise the previously-disseminated information, and have a final round of questions/clarifications.
Not all meetings need to be people sitting in a room doing random talking.
I mostly come up with better ideas asynchronously anyway, after having some time to mull it over.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 20.2 ms ] threadWhat gets the creative juices flowing probably varies from person to person, but likely reducing interaction to a small window is low on that list.
My gut is that for any ideation activity, individuals will have an initial set of ideas, and communicate this (whether spoken, or as jotted notes in the conferencing tool's chat). Those will have the earlier timestamps.
Then there are "spin-off" ideas, which you usually have more of in a face-to-face context, which will have the later timestamps.
I'd would have also liked to see if idea A inspired idea B, so a tree of ideas.
What I'm getting at: I'd like to check which of the "initial" or "spin-off" ideas were the "best" ideas. From experience, the initial ideas folks come up with usually spring from their prior experience, which means it's usually based on tried-and-trusted ideas which came before.
Also, I think it depends on the group: maturity, experience, etc. I generally hate big group discussions, and you inevitably have some in the group who dominate discussions. What I prefer is getting a meeting agenda ahead of time so I can come in prepared. Bonus if attendees can send their preliminary thoughts via email ahead of time. That will ensure that any verbal discussion is to the point, summarised, and leave room for any last-minute questions.
E.g. I would love more meetings to be like this one (involving Richard Feynman; he uses the phrase "great men", but I prefer "great people"):
https://juanuys.com/blog/2017/02/26/great-men-or-how-to-cond...
I agree, if there's a big "sprint 0" idea push that needs to happen, I'm all for get-togethers. But once that's out of the way, I prefer remote work for various reasons, as the task list is known, and I can crack on without interruptions.
Then there are all sorts of things we can do for the smaller ideation instances that pop over over the product development lifecycle, like setting meeting agendas, having folks send their notes ahead of time, and using the actual meeting to finalise the previously-disseminated information, and have a final round of questions/clarifications.
Not all meetings need to be people sitting in a room doing random talking.
I mostly come up with better ideas asynchronously anyway, after having some time to mull it over.