On critical thinking & the changing nature of team work

I read this fabulous piece this week on Medium. ‘Screen Time is changing our brain circuitry’ by Maryanne Wolf.

Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive Neuroscientist, unpacks how our brains behave when reading in print vs digital device. Take the time to read this article over! https://t.co/TUFp0bwEg2 

Her piece here reminded me of a recent experience. I’ve been reflecting on this topic for months now in a very different context: teamwork & collaboration in the workspace.

My not so popular opinion: Conversations & teamwork on slack and other collaboration apps are very linear in nature when it comes to discussing ideas, problem solving and collaborating. I saw plenty of miscommunication, people misunderstanding ideas tossed while believing that they actually got it, people working in isolation and then showing up with ideas they’d made up their minds on, having trouble letting it go. I saw quality of critical thinking dip heavily because of a lack of healthy space to argue, push, pull and dissect.

The problem with digital spaces or the productivity tools we use today, is how we bring ourselves to believe that those spaces are where most of our 'work' gets done. While this is certainly true for many of us working across teams, these are not tools meant to replace the traditional spaces and physical forms we use for thinking.

 I recently banned laptops, digital conversations during specific types of teamwork sessions, insisting on paper sketches, key takeaway summaries on paper that we put up around us and the results have been wonderful. 

Maryanne makes a great point here in the article abt digital-only as possibly impeding/changing nature of critical thinking. This is certainly true of sessions that require collaborative problem solving. When you’re talking to each other on slack & getting work and thinking done, we’re all talking at each other and hoping we’re all seeing the same picture. Each of us is most likely seeing a diff picture or angle of the concept we’re trying to paint together. Reading, writing, sketching in teams and staring at the same pieces of paper makes arguments seamless, in real-time. They create the space for exploring multiple angles, in a highly non-linear fashion and allow us all to shape and look at the same thing, together. 

As a founder, manager, project leader you can push, pull, foster critical thinking in a shared space (including remote teams through zoom or hangouts or otherwise). You can ask why, how and what, a 100 times over and bring the entire team along towards a goal. Bringing everyone along for the ride, especially in early stages of a project and at routine intervals after, allows you to get the team moving in the same direction, through ups and downs. Everyone is invested, forced to critically think together, separately and back together, cyclically. *A glimpse of #TeamMSD #TeamVue as we go paper-only every few weeks.

There is a place for productivity apps. They’re wonderful tools without which we can’t imagine the work we do today. They’re not meant to replace the ways that help ‘thinking fast, slow’ or what we do for collaborative thinking and problem solving. Turn to Design thinking, Participatory Design and simple tools for ideation and brainstorm that help nurture the ability to think critically and build teams that work together. Do yourself and your teams a favor and create no laptop ‘war rooms’, ‘team workspaces’ where you get your teams to think routinely, without the distraction of the digital.