Vlad's Roam Garden

asynchronous individual ideation is more effective than the group one

seedling brainstorming ideation collaboration collective intelligence information cascade independence Efficient Market hypothesis Yes, and group interaction asynchronous make-public

This resonates with the idea expressed in The Wisdom of Crowds - a group of people performs best if each of them brings their diverse perspectives (and biases) to the table. This happens only when people do their knowledge work independently.

If they confer - results end up being considerably worse, as diversity of perspectives gets superseded by "consensus" or most eloquently expressed opinions

Another potential source of convergence of perspectives is people using the same underlying sources of information

For the purposes of brainstorming - you probably don't want to have total independence, as you wan't to encourage Yes, and kind of interactions.

But you want to ensure that people don't block each other. Posting ideas to the common publicly visible place can be one mechanism that ensures this.

reference

The Wisdom of Crowds

https://fs.blog/2013/02/how-you-can-make-brainstorming-better/

Psychologists usually offer three explanations for the failure of group brainstorming. The first is social loafing: in a group, some individuals tend to sit back and let others do the work. The second is production blocking: only one person can talk or produce an idea at once, while the other group members are forced to sit passively. And the third is evaluation apprehension, meaning the fear of looking stupid in front of one’s peers

Another part that I find quite interesting is an analysis of group performance at a creative/problem solving tasks. This part tells us about how the groups organized, as usual face-to-face discussion groups tend to perform at the same or worse level than individual members. Which may seem counterintuitive, until you factor in the way the discussion is usually conducted in this kind of groups (the ideas that are supported tend to be not the best ones but more eloquently presented ones).

asynchronous individual ideation is more effective than the group one