Mattias Altin

“When people create maps of an unknowable, unpredictable world, they face strong temptations toward either overconfident knowing or overly cautious doubt. Wisdom consists of an attitude toward one’s beliefs, values, knowledge, and information that resists these temptations through an ongoing balance between knowing and doubt.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“The old Lie:Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.”
― Wilfred Owen

“Quantity Leads to Quality For many of us, brainstorming seems unnecessary. We hear about a customer problem or need, and our brain immediately jumps to a solution. It’s human nature. We are good at closing the loop—we hear about a problem, and our brain wants to solve it. However, creativity research tells us that our first idea is rarely our best idea. Researchers measure creativity using three primary criteria: fluency (the number of ideas we generate), flexibility (how diverse the ideas are), and originality (how novel an idea is).35 Similar research shows that fluency is correlated with both flexibility and originality.36 In other words, as we generate more ideas, the diversity and novelty of those ideas increases. Additionally, the most original ideas tend to be generated toward the end of the ideation session.37 They weren’t the first ideas we came up with. So even though our brain is very good at generating fast solutions, we want to learn to keep the loop open longer. We want to learn to push beyond our first mediocre and obvious ideas, and delve into the realm of more diverse, original ideas.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“As brainstorming rose in popularity, academic researchers started to question if it worked. Was brainstorming in groups the most effective way to generate ideas? For decades researchers ran studies in which they compared the creative output of brainstorming groups against the creative output of the same number of individuals generating ideas alone. Study after study found that the individuals generating ideas alone outperformed the brainstorming groups. Individuals generated more ideas, more diverse ideas, and more original ideas.38 As researchers dug into why individuals outperformed groups, they identified four mitigating factors. First, research has found that people tend to work harder when working individually than when working in groups. This is called social loafing. When we are on our own, we have no choice but to put in the work, whereas when we are in a group, we can rely on the efforts of others. Second, brainstorming groups exhibited many of the common challenges associated with group conformity. The early ideas set the tone for later ideas. Ideas were often too conservative or similar to each other. Members censored their ideas due to concerns about how others would judge their ideas. Third, brainstorming groups ran into challenges with production blocking—that’s a fancy term for a simple idea. Have you ever been about to say something when someone else jumped in, prompting you to forget what you were going to say? That’s production blocking. In group brainstorming sessions, people lose ideas amid the chaos of everyone sharing ideas in rapid succession. And finally, the fourth factor is a common group trait known as downward norm setting—the performance of the group tends to be limited to the lowest-performing member. Rather than the strongest member raising everyone else up, the opposite happens. The weakest member brings everyone else down. These factors combined to inhibit the performance of the brainstorming groups as compared to the individuals who generated ideas alone.39”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value