I am sick of sitting through meetings and being forced to work on things in groups. In the past couple of days I’ve come up with an airtight mathematical formula to determine the probability of a meeting being an effective use of time:
P = 100 * (1/2)(n-1)
where P is the probability (as a per cent) of a meeting (or team project) being effective, and n is the number of people involved in said meeting or team project.
So a meeting of two people has a 50% chance of being effective. That sounds about right, doesn’t it? You sit down with one other person, and it could go either way, really. It depends on the nature of the project, it depends on the two people and their chemistry (or lack thereof), it depends on the time of day and the weather. But generally when I sit down to talk with just one other person, I say to myself, “Well, maybe this will be a waste of my time and maybe it won’t. 50-50.”
As soon as you start adding beyond one other person, though, your chances of effectiveness plummet exponentially. Each additional person cuts the probability in half. A meeting of 5 or 6 people still has a slim chance of being worthwhile, but once you get a meeting of 8 or more (which I had just yesterday), you’re looking at probabilities of effectiveness below 1%.
What does this irrefutable mathematical fact say about our cherished principles of the democratic workplace? Well, it says what we all knew all along, which is that those cherished principles are a damned lie. Most problems are best solved in solitude. Groups of people suck at actually getting things done.
A group composed of people who have all been working hard in solitude might (might) come together at the end of everyone’s individual efforts to make something great. But a group of people trying to decide shit around a conference table will rarely do anything.
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Postscript: An implication of my formula is that a meeting of one (a solo project) has a 100% chance of being an effective use of time. Obviously that isn’t true, since solo projects frequently fail. But then, that might be taking the mathematics too literally.
Post-postscript: Another implication is that a meeting of zero (guess that means everyone stays in bed that day) has a 200% chance of being an effective use of time. I don’t know what conclusion to draw from that.
Is there such a thing as a meeting of one? You can make a semantic proof there, and I say it's worthy.
ReplyDeleteI dreamed up something similar as a general function of change in intelligence. That even if you get a group of intelligent people together their collective intelligence (as a group) decreases accordingly it does not average--it plummets. Maybe using 1/n?
I don't know how to make a semantic proof. Up to you, buddy.
DeleteI'd agree that collective intelligence usually doesn't average. It has to be a group of intelligent people who also have some kind of chemistry with one another. And that's an elusive ingredient.