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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Principles for Productive Group Meetings, published by jsteinhardt on March 22, 2023 on LessWrong.
Note: This post is based on a Google document I created for my research group. It speaks in the first person, but I think the lessons could be helpful for many research groups, so I decided to share it more broadly. Thanks to Louise Verkin for converting from Google doc to Markdown format.
This document talks about principles for having productive group meetings and seminars, and to some extent a good group culture in general. It’s meant to be a living document--I’ve started it based on my own experiences, but ultimately our seminars and group culture come from all of us together. So if you have ideas you want to add, please do so!
I’ll start by talking about an important concept called psychological safety, then discuss what I see as the goals of our research group and how that fits into presentations and discussions in seminars and meetings. I’ll also provide tips for asking excellent questions and some general philosophy on how to hold yourself to a high standard of understanding.
Psychological Safety
Psychological safety is an important concept for fostering creative and high-functioning teams. I would highly recommend reading the following two documents to learn about it in detail:
What Do Psychologically Safe Work Teams Look Like?
Manager Actions for Psychological Safety
To summarize, a psychologically safe team is one where members feel like:
They can make mistakes without it affecting their status in the group
It is easy to give and receive feedback, including critical feedback, without feeling attacked or like one is causing trouble
One is allowed to and encouraged to question prevailing opinions
These are especially important in research environments, because questioning and risk-taking are needed to generate creative ideas, and making mistakes and receiving feedback are necessary for learning. In general, I would encourage everyone in our group to take risks and make mistakes. I know everyone holds themselves to a high standard and so doesn’t like to make mistakes, but this is the main way to learn. In general, if you never do anything that causes you to look silly, you probably aren’t taking enough risks. And in another direction, if you never annoy anyone you probably aren’t taking enough risks. (Of course, you don’t want to do these all the time, but if it never happens then you can probably safely push your boundaries a bit.)
Fostering psychological safety. As a group, here are some general principles for fostering psychological safety among our teammates:
Assume your teammates have something to teach you, and try to learn from them.
In discussions and debates, aim to explain/understand, not to persuade. Adopt a frame of collaborative truth-seeking, rather than trying to “win” an argument.
Acknowledge and thank people for good points/questions/presentations/etc.
Invite push-back
Welcome and encourage newcomers
In addition, there are a couple things to avoid:
Try not to talk over people. Sometimes this happens due to being very excited and engaged in a conversation, and don’t sweat it if you do this occasionally, but try not to do it habitually, and if you do do it make sure to invite the person you interrupted to finish their point.
Avoid making broadly negative or dismissive statements. Even if you personally don’t intend such a statement to apply to anyone in the group, it’s inevitable that someone will take it personally. It also works against the principle of “questioning prevailing opinions”, because it implies that there’s an entire area of work or claims that is “off-limits”.As an example, when I was a PhD student, a senior person often made claims to the effect that “research was pointless unless industry people cared about it”. This made it feel ...
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