“I’m really just a sideshow,” neuroscientist and science writer Jonah Lehrer said to the opening general audience at WEC.

Lehrer, though, provided much more than sideshow entertainment like the kind you’d find at a carnival. His insights about creativity, innovation, and the importance of face-to-face connections resonated with a crowd that is all too often questioned about the role meeting professionals play in business success. 

Starting with a story about Skunk Works and its development of the stealth bomber, Lehrer moved into the meat of his talk: how to foster creativity. According to him, there are two main strains of creative success--states of relaxation and grit.

“Answers arrive only after you stop looking for them,” Lehrer said. “However, levels of grit are the single best predictors of success.”

It can be reasoned that for attendees seeking the best way to experience WEC and to get the most out of it, they should work hard and take strategic breaks. Get up and walk around when you’ve hit a wall. Go take a warm shower. Have a beer. But don’t give up. Be determined in what you plan to accomplish.

That’s what Lehrer ultimately urges for the audience.

“The job of a keynote is to be provocative,” he said in an interview after the session. “Speakers are here to inspire conversations.”

And that’s exactly what he did. His talk caused hundreds of tweets and comments, during and after the event.

“I feel much smarter and a new way of thinking,” wrote Jennifer Bissett, U.S. corporate account director for Tourism Toronto, on Twitter.

“From on Jonah to another,” wrote Jonah Wolfraim, communications manager for EventMobi, on Twitter. “Thanks for a great opening keynote.”

We agree.

Jonah Lehrer—our opening keynote speaker at WEC 2012 in St. Louis—wrote in a recent New Yorker article that "the increasing complexity of human knowledge, coupled with the escalating difficulty of those remaining questions, means that people must either work together or fail alone."

It's true. Most of humanity's challenges are so complex today, it takes a group effort to work on them. The days of individual problem solvers are over. It's a new time, when collaboration and connections are tantamount to survival. 

Part of the group process, though, is empowering individuals to realize they have important ideas to share. It does no good to have a group working on a challenge if the individuals aren't aware of their own knowledge.

Dr. Bryan Bonner, an associate professor at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, believes the first step to building successful organizations is simple: self-realization by each participant of his or her unique knowledge and experience. 

Bonner co-authored “Leveraging Member Expertise to Improve Knowledge Transfer and Demonstrability in Groups” with Dr. Michael Baumann, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas in San Antonio. The study, published in February’s edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, concludes that “for groups to be successful, they must exploit the knowledge of their (individual) members effectively.” 

“It doesn’t take much. All you have to do is have people sit there for a while and think, ‘What is it I already know about this, and how can that help find the solution?’” Bonner said. “People find they often know more than they think they do; they realize that they might not know the whole answer to the problem, but there are a couple things they do know that might help the group come to a solution.” 

The researchers used 540 University of Utah undergraduate students, assigning half to three-member groups on one hand, with the remaining 270 participants working as individuals. Their task: arriving at estimates closest to the correct answers to such questions as the elevation of Utah’s King’s Peak; the weight of the heaviest man in history; the population of Utah; and the minimum driving distance between Salt Lake City and New York City. 

“We solve problems by using the many examples, good and bad, we’ve gathered through hard-won experience throughout our lives. The problem is that we’re not nearly as good at applying old knowledge to new problems as you’d think,” Bonner said. “Research over more than a century has tried, without much success, to figure out how we can do a better job.” 

Bonner and Baumann, however, are convinced their study shows that “although the sheer amount of brainpower it takes to consistently and effectively transfer learning from old to new is beyond many individuals, groups of people working together can actually be very good at it.” 

And that's where meetings come into play. They are a catalyst for change, for igniting new ideas, for giving your worldview a good, hard shake.

"The most creative spaces are those which hurl us together," Lehrer wrote. "It is the human friction that makes the sparks."  

The world's problems are so complex that they're too difficult for any one person to solve alone, according to scientist and writer Jonah Lehrer. I agree. We've reach a point in our evolution where collaboration is the best choice when setting out to produce or solve.  

"The complexity of our 21st century problems (clean coal, hydrogen cars, everything in neuroscience, string theory, etc.) has not just led to a postponement in peak creativity," Lehrer wrote on his blog, The Frontal Cortex. "It has also lessened the importance of the individual."

This is one reason why face-to-face meetings and conferences are so important. They offer those lone individuals the opportunity to connect with other like-minded people—or even those who think differently than them—to test out theories, exchange information or marry ideas into something productive. 

"If our current lists of global thinkers seem paltry, it’s because the best thinkers no longer exist by themselves, toiling away in a vacuum," he wrote. "Instead, they require the constant feedback and knowledge of others. We live in a world of such complexity that our problems increasingly exceed the possibilities of the individual mind. Collaboration is no longer an option."