https://hbr.org/2021/01/stand-up-meetings-inhibit-innovation In Google’s hackathon, teams that held stand-up meetings (agile periodic status sharing often done in development) achieved less novelty (patentability) than those that did not, A study that found that teams that did not have novelty (patentability) did not perform well.
What is being considered as a cause
- 1: Make them very aware of deadlines. Even if you are not behind schedule. Focus on the certainties, avoiding uncertainties that could cause delays for team members.
- 2: The goal is explicitly defined. This leads to a focus on achieving that goal and prevents open exploration.
- 3: Allow them to focus on work that can be easily integrated with the accomplishments of other members of the team. Prevents them from delving deeper into specific areas.
I would like to know the specifics of the experiment (what kind of people and how long the hackathon was, how often the information sharing meetings were held). Hackathons often have tight deadlines, so when teams consider it an important objective to get things into shape by the deadline, the environment will be high deadline pressure, which will have a strong effect on idea generation as described above. On the other hand, there are teams that perceive a hackathon as “an opportunity to be free from business constraints and explore,” in which case, I wonder if it does not hinder idea generation so much. It is possible that there is a correlation between these teams and the fact that they do not do many standups. Maybe we need psychological safety to make people believe, “I won’t be made fun of if I don’t make it to the hackathon.”
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