Toward assembling a committee, Part 1

You want to see a professor wince? Randomly insert the word “committee” into a conversation. Just try it.

Truth is, most of us have a love-hate relationship with committees. Collaborations with colleagues are essential, and in your research, you will find that many of the most interesting questions can only be addressed when you bring people on board. But how do you put together committees toward generating something creative? Specifically, how many people do you assign to a task?

What you’re up against: An observation in the form of a stupid joke.
“What do faculty meetings and spackle have in common?”. Answer: They are amazingly efficient fillers. Put a bunch of faculty around a table for an hour, throw out any topic sentence, and wait. Someone will comment. Then someone will expand on that comment. Then someone will qualify it. Then someone will tell a lame joke who’s real intent is to slam the second commenter. Pretty soon, hours up!

A general principle: Creativity is a two-part process.
Its about generating a lot of ideas and then culling that list down to the good ones.

An insight: The Dumbness of Crowds arises from a creativity imbalance
Kathy Sierra gives plenty of examples as to how, if you are putting together a group of people to creatively solve a problem, more ain’t necessarily better. Why? I suspect its partly due to the Creativity Principle. We want to get lots of input, lots of ideas. But the process of recognizing the best ideas is hampered by the very group size that generated them in the first place. In part, we want to be nice: there are no “bad ideas”, everyone can contribute, that sort of thing. But as Sierra points out,

Art isn’t made by committee.

Great design isn’t made by consensus.

True wisdom isn’t captured from a crowd.

We leave this topic for now with an excellent example of design by committee, with a bit of a swipe at Microsoft (which is always fun).  In the meantime, any good committee horror stories?

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30 minutes a day you can’t afford to miss

One of the struggles in grad school is the 30 minute conundrum.  Think of all the activities you have to choose from that, if you just invested 30 minutes a day, would improve your productivity, foster your self image, and win with war for the allies.

Well, here’s an interesting study by Charles Emery and colleagues that went like this.  When older, sedentary folks were given a small skin injury, half were assigned an exercise regime of 1 hour, 3 times a week.  The couch potato controls healed, on average, in 39 days; the new exercizers healed 10 days earlier.

You have only one body. Exercise and good diet is the way you take care of it.

Just do it.

ht trizle