Why Brainstorming is an Individualistic Cloud and Not a Group Ray of Hope

When I was growing up in school, brainstorming was a popular way to force students to mingle ideas and to allegedly communicate non-judgmental bits of information. Unfortunately, if you didn’t have a proper leader for a brainstorming session, the task quickly became dull, and critical, and I always found those forced sessions to be less about new ideas and more about everyone deciding to just confirm the mainstream, mortal, status quo. I also learned to keep my mouth shut, and my contributions to a minimum, because I knew my outlier notions would be met with ridicule and misunderstanding.

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Why Blogger Sucks It

We all know Blogger is a sucky place to do any sort of serious blogging — but sometimes inactive use of a service lulls us into a false sense of satiety and satisfaction and that’s precisely what happened to us.

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How a Rumor Mill Grinds the Truth

How do Rumor Mills get started?  How does that vicious machine take the truth and re-grind it into false consumption by the masses?

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Why Groups Fail

Wilfred Ruprecht Bion is an interesting researcher who has published a lot of work on group dynamics and he explains why and how groups fail to thrive.

W. R. Bion generally suggests groups are always calculated to fail because of a forced sense of cohesion that is only a cover for competing individual internal desires “unspoken private motives sabotage the public group effort to preserve the self in society.”
In my experience, groups spend a lot of time arguing over process and not in achieving end product.

It is easy to tear down and difficult to build up and those who cannot build up tear down.
Criticism works best when suggestions for improvement are immediately included in the commentary.

Groups more reliably find success when a hierarchical structure is imposed from an outside authority.

A Group Leader helps get things does as does mandating a clear method from outside the group for enforcing for decision-making beyond group unanimity.