{"id":34139,"date":"2021-04-18T23:22:32","date_gmt":"2021-04-19T06:22:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=34139"},"modified":"2021-04-18T23:22:53","modified_gmt":"2021-04-19T06:22:53","slug":"keep-brainstorming-your-best-ideas-are-still-to-come","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=34139","title":{"rendered":"Keep Brainstorming\u2014Your Best Ideas Are Still to Come"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source:\u00a0https:\/\/insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu\/article\/keep-brainstorming-ideas-creative-cliff?utm_source=subscriber&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pianomailer042021&pnespid=1LVz9qBYClKNh9U88SplyXFOBngM2WL.qzzfItTD<\/a><\/h3>\n

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The common (and mistaken) belief that we generate our best ideas early can actually squash creativity.<\/h3>\n
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BASED ON THE RESEARCH OF<\/div>\n

Brian Lucas<\/p>\n

Loran Nordgren<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"group<\/p>\n

Michael Meier<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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Imagine a team brainstorming session. At what point in the meeting do you think you\u2019ll come up with your best, most inventive idea?<\/p>\n

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Most people assume that lightbulb moment will arrive right away, when you\u2019re feeling freshest. But according to new research, we\u2019ve got it wrong.<\/p>\n

Across several studies,\u00a0Loran Nordgren<\/a>, a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School, and Kellogg PhD alumnus\u00a0Brian Lucas<\/a>, now of Cornell University, discovered a widespread, persistent, and mistaken belief that creativity drops off with time. They dub this the \u201ccreative-cliff illusion.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, they found, the illusion is self-defeating. The more people believe in it, the fewer creative ideas they generate. But with experience comes wisdom, Nordgren and Lucas learned: people who do lots of creative work do not fall victim as often to the myth of declining creativity.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople think their best ideas are coming fast and early,\u201d Nordgren says. In fact, \u201cyou\u2019re either not seeing any drop-off in quality, or your ideas get better.\u201d By giving up too soon, we risk leaving our best ideas on the table.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Nordgren believes bringing attention to the problem can help people unlock new ways of thinking. \u201cPeople don\u2019t maximize their creative potential, and part of that is because of these beliefs,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Creativity Increases as You Brainstorm<\/h2>\n

Nordgren and Lucas began by recruiting a group of 165 online participants, all of whom had previously worked at charitable organizations, to complete a five-minute brainstorming task. Before they got started, participants were asked to predict their creativity during each minute of the task.<\/p>\n

Next, participants set to work generating ideas for how a charity could increase donations. As motivation to keep the juices flowing, the researchers told participants they would be entered in a lottery to win $50 for each idea they came up with.<\/p>\n

Then, Nordgren and Lucas recruited a new group of online participants to rate the creativity of the ideas the first set of participants had generated.<\/p>\n

Participants in the brainstorming task gave faulty predictions about their own creativity, the researchers\u2019 analysis revealed. While people thought they would become less creative as the session went on, the opposite was true: their creativity\u2014as rated by the second group of participants\u2014actually increased.<\/p>\n

Confusing Productivity with Creativity<\/h2>\n

Why do people so uniformly believe their creativity will decline the longer they tussle with a problem?<\/p>\n

Nordgren and Lucas suspected people confuse creativity with the ease of generating ideas. For many of us, early ideas come quickly, while later ideas prove more elusive as the brainstorm slows to a brain drizzle. This experience of difficulty could easily be misinterpreted as a decrease in the quality of ideas.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cOur best ideas are there. They just require more digging.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 Loran Nordgren<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

To test the hypothesis, the researchers repeated the same study as before, recruiting 191 new participants. This time, however, participants predicted their creativity after they had already finished generating ideas.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t matter. Even after the brainstorming task was complete, participants incorrectly judged their later ideas as less creative\u2014because, the researchers reasoned, those ideas were harder to access. Yet, as in the first study, the opposite was true: ideas that took longer to excavate were more likely to be truly innovative.<\/p>\n

No Laughing Matter: False Beliefs about Creativity Make Us Less Creative<\/h2>\n

In another study, Nordgren and Lucas put the creative-cliff illusion to the test in a real-world setting. They recruited students and alumni of The Second City\u2019s training program to participate in a New Yorker\u2013style cartoon-caption contest with the promise of a $150 first prize. The online competition was judged by three professional comedians, who rated the 91 submissions for novelty and funniness (a proxy for creativity).<\/p>\n

Contest entrants were given 15 minutes to generate as many caption ideas as they could, but they weren\u2019t required to use the full time. Participants also answered a series of questions about their beliefs about creativity, such as \u201cPeople tend to generate their best ideas first.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those who believed good ideas come early submitted fewer jokes overall, the researchers found\u2014and fewer of the jokes they submitted were rated as highly creative by the judges. In other words, the more people believed their funniness would fade over the 15-minute task, the less productive and funny they actually were.<\/p>\n

Experience Can Counter the Creative-Cliff Illusion<\/h2>\n

Would experience cut through the creative-cliff illusion? The researchers suspected it might\u2014perhaps people with many years of creative work under their belts might be less susceptible to the myth.<\/p>\n

The researchers recruited a group of 163 online participants and asked them to rate how often they had to use creative skills in their work (not at all, occasionally, or frequently). The participants completed the same brainstorming task used in the first study\u2014predicting their creativity during each minute of the five-minute task, then coming up with ideas to increase charitable donations.<\/p>\n

Participants who never or only occasionally did creative work were much like the participants in the first study: they predicted their creativity would decline over the course of the brainstorming task, when in reality the opposite was true.<\/p>\n

But participants with lots of creative experience didn\u2019t make the same mistake. They predicted that creativity would remain relatively constant\u2014a belief that is still overly pessimistic, but closer to correct than most other participants\u2019 predictions. Experience helped them see the power of continuing to chip away at the problem.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really people who are in the trenches doing creative work that learn this lesson,\u201d Nordgren says.<\/p>\n

The Power of Persistence<\/h2>\n

What does this mean for your next brainstorming meeting? For Nordgren, there\u2019s one very simple takeaway.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re struggling, keep going,\u201d he says. This and\u00a0his earlier research on creativity reveal<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cour intuitions about how this process works are wrong, and that our best ideas are there. They just require more digging.\u201d<\/p>\n

This may mean resisting the temptation to select an idea just because a meeting is ending\u2014a temptation rooted in the false belief that future ideas will be worse. Instead, \u201cmaybe you say, \u2018I think there are still some better ideas we haven\u2019t explored. Let\u2019s all commit individually to putting another hour into this and come back next week.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not easy to do\u2014something Nordgren, who is currently at work on a book, knows firsthand. But he\u2019s committed to taking his own advice. \u201cThese ideas are influential in those moments,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ll think, \u2018this is a pretty good example, but is there a better one?\u2019 It\u2019s a nudge to keep going beyond what my intuition tells me to.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Source:\u00a0https:\/\/insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu\/article\/keep-brainstorming-ideas-creative-cliff?utm_source=subscriber&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pianomailer042021&pnespid=1LVz9qBYClKNh9U88SplyXFOBngM2WL.qzzfItTD The common (and mistaken) belief...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34139"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34141,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34139\/revisions\/34141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}