- By Clive Thompson
- Email Author
- March 21, 2012
- 12:34 pm
Guy Kawasaki, by all appearances, seems like an outgoing guy. A former Apple “evangelist,” he’s an omnipresent voice online, blogging his ideas about entrepreneurship and tweeting 40 times a day to his half-million followers.
But a few years ago he posted a surprising 140-character revelation. “You may find this hard to believe,” Kawasaki wrote, “but I am an introvert. I have a ‘role’ to play, but fundamentally I am a loner.” His followers were gobsmacked.
You can understand their confusion. As Susan Cain points out in her much-discussed new book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, introverts get a bad rap in American culture. Ever since Dale Carnegie began writing manuals might l on glad-handing your way up the corporate ladder, US society has embraced the idea that extroversion is key to success: Your achievement—and even your level of creativity—depends upon your being gregarious and outgoing and able to work well in a team.
But as Cain’s work indicates, a new picture is emerging. Forcing everyone to act like extroverts harms the quality of our work and our lives. The good news that I’d add? Many digital tools are helping to mitigate that harm.
About half of Americans are introverts, Cain says. These are people who have a superb ability to focus but work best alone and become drained by too much enforced socializing. Yet the US workplace has evolved in complete opposition to their needs. Private office space has shrunk dramatically: 30 years ago, companies averaged more than 500 square feet per employee; today it’s less than 200. Meanwhile, corporations have pushed employees to work in face-to-face teams, marching them endlessly into conference rooms for brainstorms.
“There’s such a stigma against introversion,” Cain says. “To reveal that you’re an introvert puts you in a bad light.”
Yet this incessant teamwork isn’t useful. A mountain of studies has shown that face-to-face brainstorming and teamwork often lead to inferior decisionmaking. That’s because social dynamics lead groups astray; they coalesce around the loudest extrovert’s most confidently asserted idea, no matter how daft it might be.
What works better? “Virtual” collaboration—with team members cogitating on solutions alone, in private, before getting together to talk them over. As Cain discovered, researchers have found that groups working in this fashion generate better ideas and solve problems more adroitly. To really get the best out of people, have them work alone first, then network later.
Sounds like the way people collaborate on the Internet, doesn’t it?
Indeed it is—and as I’ve noticed, my introvert friends love it. Sure, the digital era has uncorked a fire hose of interaction, but it’s mostly asynchronous. With texting, chat, status updates, comment threads, and email, you hash over ideas and thoughts with a pause between each utterance, giving crucial time for reflection. Plus, you can do so in private.
“This is precisely what brings out the best in introverts,” Cain agrees. It’s why someone like Kawasaki thrives online. And it’s how the epic collaborations of the digital age—like Linux and Wikipedia—function: with a constellation of folks, many of whom probably peg the needle on the Introvert-O-Meter, working intimately but remotely.
Granted, not all online tools are good for introverts. As Cain says, research shows that Facebook’s endless friend-collecting is more appealing to extroverts than introverts.
But overall the irony here is pretty gorgeous. It suggests we’ve been thinking about the social web the wrong way. We generally assume that it has unleashed an unruly explosion of disclosure, a constant high school of blather. But what it has really done is made our culture more introverted—and productively so.
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