3 ms·

If the context wasn't WWII then the meeting might have gone very differently. A high level of crisis can tend to focus things a bit. It will, by necessity, bias

If the context wasn't WWII then the meeting might have gone very differently. A high level of crisis can tend to focus things a bit. It will, by necessity, bias things towards action when some action is definitively required. At that point the hope is that you stumble upon a moderately effective (or better) course of action and not just one that says, "we have to do something. $X is something, therefore we have to do $X" In my workplace during the pandemic I have seen this bias towards action play out. New (barely MVP) systems and integrations build in a week that would have been a year to get to the same point normally. A yes, there were a few nonsense "$action must be done" as well, but we managed the crisis too.

HWR_14 5y ago
You're missing the point of the story. It wasn't "bias toward action". It was "the point was made once sat the beginning of a long meeting, never brought up again, and ended up being considered the right outcome at the end." That is, what made the meeting exciting was that everyone presented an opinion, did it one time, and retained what everyone else said.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Yes, and I'm saying that if it weren't a war crisis that meeting may have played out very differently. And I'm saying that meetings today, now & throughout the COVID crisis, have played out very differently than before, resembling that of the linked article more closely. There has certainly been more discussion & review of options than in the linked article, more debating of relative merits. But, then again, the circumstances I've been working through in my organization are not as clear cut as the optimal method of extracting a substance where there are discrete known facts. And the people involved have been experts in varying domains, not all physicists or related backgrounds where the merits of an opinion can be understood by the others without more discussion. Also this was one meeting: I doubt that every meeting among the people in the article all went so smoothly, with never debate or need for someone to rearticulate or expand their explanation of a point of view. Please note that I am not saying these men weren't great, and that the group dynamic Feynman describes isn't at least partly indicative of their level of intelligence. What I am saying is that the group dynamic described is not unique to people of towering genius. Having weathered many crisis (to be sure none on the scale of WW II) my observation is that this group dynamic cannot be disentangled from the crisis context and only-- somewhat simplistically-- attributed to "these were great men". Greatness of mind is not a universal panacea for indecision and uncertainly. Crisis on the other hand forces people to push through those things.

HWR_14 5y ago

You're missing the point of the story. It wasn't "bias toward action". It was "the point was made once sat the beginning of a long meeting, never brought up again, and ended up being considered the right outcome at the end." That is, what made the meeting exciting was that everyone presented an opinion, did it one time, and retained what everyone else said.

ineedasername 5y ago
Yes, and I'm saying that if it weren't a war crisis that meeting may have played out very differently. And I'm saying that meetings today, now & throughout the COVID crisis, have played out very differently than before, resembling that of the linked article more closely. There has certainly been more discussion & review of options than in the linked article, more debating of relative merits. But, then again, the circumstances I've been working through in my organization are not as clear cut as the optimal method of extracting a substance where there are discrete known facts. And the people involved have been experts in varying domains, not all physicists or related backgrounds where the merits of an opinion can be understood by the others without more discussion. Also this was one meeting: I doubt that every meeting among the people in the article all went so smoothly, with never debate or need for someone to rearticulate or expand their explanation of a point of view. Please note that I am not saying these men weren't great, and that the group dynamic Feynman describes isn't at least partly indicative of their level of intelligence. What I am saying is that the group dynamic described is not unique to people of towering genius. Having weathered many crisis (to be sure none on the scale of WW II) my observation is that this group dynamic cannot be disentangled from the crisis context and only-- somewhat simplistically-- attributed to "these were great men". Greatness of mind is not a universal panacea for indecision and uncertainly. Crisis on the other hand forces people to push through those things.