It's not what we [want to] believe it is

In this article: Examining a few of the corporate, management and coaching mindset myths believed to increase productivity, innovation and creative thinking, but really do the opposite while increasing staff turnover, illness and hostility.

Multitasking
We have a single stream of conscious attention which although can jump quickly from activity to activity, can only focus on one at a time. So what looks like multitasking is really a constant interruption of the stream of attention reducing productivity and increasing our mistakes by up to 50%.

Groupthink and brainstorming
Over forty years of research shows that if efficiency and creativity is the priority we should be left to work alone, because we produce more and higher quality ideas alone than in a group. And to make matters worse, that performance drops as the group size increases.

Collaboration
That passive forms of collaboration like email, instant messaging, cloud documents and online chat tools work more effectively than active forms of collaboration like meetings and group activities.

Open plan offices
Personal space and freedom from peer pressure, even the types of pressure created in team building and groupthink environments, are essential for creativity and productivity.
Open plan offices impair memory, increase staff turnover, and make people sick, hostile, unmotivated and insecure.
Open plan workers are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, elevated levels of stress, susceptibility to illness especially flu, and argue more with colleagues.

In short the single biggest barrier to creativity and productivity is interruption.

I would argue that groupthink; brainstorming and collective action plays more to the organiser’s desire for control than to the real objective of forging new ideas and of finding innovative ways to apply them. There are benefits to social interaction like the introduction of new narratives, attachment, the creation of a social glue and a sense of shared purpose, but productivity and creativity aren't amongst them.