Decades of research on group brainstorming have shown, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), that it basically doesn’t work:
Participants who have valuable insights stay quiet for fear of looking stupid, or the group simply conforms to the speaker who is the most forceful, or who makes the most money. (This last factor is colloquially known as HiPPO: highest-paid person’s opinion.) Participants in a brainstorming session can also be confused by unclear norms that encourage them to say whatever comes to mind but also not to criticize. Group brainstorming works so poorly in terms of generating novel ideas that “brainwriting” works better, in which individuals write down ideas on their own, submit them anonymously, and only then come together as a group to discuss them. Brainwriting improves on brainstorming in part because it sets rules that ensure more voices and ideas are welcomed.
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The psychologists determined, first, that collective intelligence is real: Teams that did well on one task tended to do well on all, and vice versa. Incredibly, obvious factors like group cohesion, motivation, satisfaction, and the average (or maximum) intelligence of members did not predict team intelligence. But a hallmark of the best teams was that they had relatively equal “conversational turn-taking.” As in Google’s Project Aristotle, that can look messy in practice, with interjections, debates, changes of topic, and swerves from an agenda. But those are signs of healthy and inclusive group norms. Conversely, I once worked under an editor who would copy the entire office on emails when he criticized an idea. It had an immense chilling effect on some younger employees.
This is why crazy paradigm-breakers have so much potential for improvements to the collective system. Sadly, the rewards usually don’t work out. Crazy, dishonest charlatans are often rewarded, and crazy honest autistic crusaders for truth are usually burned at the stake.
I think it was Colin Wilson who claimed the crucial distinction between real thinkers and followers was that real thinkers were capable of breaking away from socially acceptable paradigms.