I already worked it out with AI, so I'm just presenting.
The team stopped thinking together
People used to work through open problems together. Now they increasingly work with AI alone and bring finished answers to the meeting. The team still meets, but more of the thinking has already happened in private.
- Meetings are a series of presentations, not working sessions.
- There's less debate and pushback than there used to be.
- Individual work has improved while group decisions haven't.
Who: you, in two recurring meetings for this workflow. Count: minutes spent presenting finished work versus minutes spent working on an open question together. You're probably looking at this pattern if nearly all the time goes to presenting. Probably not if the group still works problems through, even when people prepared with AI.
Teams contribute one at a time. That pattern is about different teams never meeting. This pattern is about one team that meets but no longer thinks together.
Ask people to share while the work is still rough, and say out loud that you expect an ugly early version.
Lay the structure out as a handful of movable cards with the group before anyone writes.
Our reasoning. Research on group intelligence is mixed: one combined analysis found that how a group works together predicted its performance about twice as strongly as individual skill (Riedl and colleagues, 2021, Established association), while another study found individual ability mattered most (Bates and Gupta, 2017, Emerging).