Group Work Is Fucked

Photo by Kabren.

Hey everyone. Meet Kenny. He’s in your class. He loves group work and for the rest of your educational years, every time you form a group you’ll have a Kenny in it. Kenny is an idiot. Group work is great for Kenny because he can mask the fact that he’s extremely inadequate in almost all fields by ‘bouncing ideas’ off other people in the group, which is a term for doing no work and hoping that if you all sit around and drink enough coffee, Kenny will fluke being smart.

Anyone who’s attended any educational institute will have had group work forced down their throats. Claims of its benefits date back centuries thanks to stupid idioms like ‘two heads are better than one’. These paradigms are based on the assumption that collective effort will trump individual effort, which I will not argue with, for this is true in certain cases. For example, when a group of complimentary individuals with contrasting talents are picked and managed by someone with an understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. Seldom is this the case throughout the pivotal learning years however.

Unfortunately, a gradual misinterpretation of this idea has lead to a dependence on group work through tertiary education. The situation is usually as follows: you’re forced to pick a group out of the blue and you scramble to find people, generally based on their locality in the classroom because you know nothing of their level of intellect. Once groups are formed, things get hairy. People who stand out in groups or show any kind of flare are often considered troublemakers, while people in routine work perfectly in these collaborative settings. As a group will very rarely consist of people with near-identical skill sets, this dynamic forces the frontrunners to move down to a level in which the lingerers can actively contribute to.

Giving these ‘inside the box’ people the power to dictate progress is like giving Hitler a role in human resources: it’s a really fucking bad idea, but it’s easy because everyone knows exactly how it’s going to pan out (badly).

Throughout history, nonconformists have contributed an array of revolutionary ideas to society. The people who wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer and restructured our way of thinking are the people who didn’t think our way in the first place. They’re the ones who thought we could do better and thought we’d fallen short. They were the brilliant ones, yet despite this obvious sentiment, there’s still a sway toward collectivism. The problem is, the kind of revolutionary idea that stems from a brilliant singular mind is the kind that would be shut down in a group setting. They are also the kind of ideas that are impossible to learn should you be forced to adhere to another person’s protocol.

Granted, some industries are systematically structured in a way that requires this, like engineering for example. Regardless, the formation of groups in such industries involves clinical analysis of all involved, rather than a ‘raise your hand if you want to be in Kenny’s group’ type scenario.

The further toward the creative realm you drift, the more detrimental the majority of teamwork becomes. The creation of most art– whether it’s music or a painting or a sculpture– is a fundamentally introverted process. One vision from one genius will be tested and tested until it works. Then, the masses will digest the innovation, revel in its beauty and praise the fact someone with such insurmountable amounts of talent was blessed with the ability to work alone without stupid people for just long enough to create brilliance.

Group work in educational settings also forces people to be fake:

I said: You’ve got some really valid points.
I meant: Hooray! Plug your asshole because you just proved you can shit out of your mouth.

I said: You’ll have to expand on that a little bit more.
I meant: You’ve clearly skimmed one page of one chapter of the text book and spent the rest of the time playing Angry Birds. In the future, just admit you’ve got the work ethic of a carrot.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: I hate group work because it drags the best down and the worst up. There you go, there’s my hypothesis. Viola. Done. If I were in a group, you wouldn’t have read that yet though, because we’d all be at Starbucks having one of those stupid fucking group meetings where everyone talks just enough to fill the silence.