Suppose that you had a large budget to organize a creative retreat for your company. Your objective is to set the stage for the open flow of ideas and explore possibilities for an important new initiative. Consider two companies—X and Y—who were in such a position. Company X decided upon a five-star, world-class resort with spectacular golfing and luxurious spa facilities. Upon checking in, team members received a lavish gift bag containing rare wine, 800-gram Turkish cotton beach towels, and more. They dined in stately rooms with private chefs and lingered for hours over gourmet meals. Their brainstorming sessions took place in twenty-five-hundred-square-foot palatial rooms with mirrored walls, vaulted ceilings, and imported chandeliers. A personal massage therapist was hired as well. Company Y chose a small, boutique hotel located in a trendy, urban city. The team worked in a small meeting room—about five hundred square feet—and they removed the chairs and stocked it with moveable sitting cubes. One of the walls was covered with whiteboard, one with cork and thumbtacks, another with flip charts, and one was a smart LCD screen that could project laptop and video images. Each day, lunches arrived from different local ethnic restaurants and a tasting was set up on a picnic blanket spread on a table that was moved in and out of the room. A trained meeting facilitator was hired. Upon leaving the retreat week, company X members reported feeling refreshed, relaxed, and ready to ease back into the stresses of work. Company Y members made huge strides on a new product concept.
In our work with companies and teams, my colleagues and I see many more examples of company X meetings than company Y meetings. Hotels and resorts are not experts in the creative process—they are experts in the relaxation process. We have to remember this when we orchestrate the working conditions to set the stage for creative collaboration. In this chapter, I introduce best practices for instigating a creative conspiracy in your team—whether you are at an off-site or right at the office. When done right, the creative stage gives teams permission to act in a very different way that most people find liberating and productive.
This chapter gives leaders practical tools on how to best structure meetings so they are productive, vibrant, and fun, whether the meeting is fifteen minutes long or a weekend off-site. The following best practices are all scientifically based and, with all due respect to consultants, none should cost more than $5 or so (mostly for materials that can be purchased in a dime store).
I use the term Brainstorming 1.0 to refer to the original rules of brainstorming that are still common practice today. Most businesses owe an enormous debt to a man they’ve never met or even heard of. That man is Alex Osborn, and he was the person who coined the term brainstorming. Osborn was not a stuffy academic, holed up in an ivory tower. Alex Osborn worked for a living in an advertising company and even more important, he believed in the power of the team. Osborn quite simply believed that the whole creative team could be much greater than the sum of its parts if they followed four simple rules, which he put forth in his book Applied Imagination. The reason Osborn has been so influential is that the rules were simple, memorable, made sense, and were nearly costless to institute and to a great extent, they worked.
First, Osborn argued that members of creative groups should freely and unabashedly express any idea that came to mind, however fanciful or strange; members should not hold back or censor any ideas.
Osborn wisely realized that expressiveness would be possible only if members did not criticize one another. So, Osborn’s second rule was to set aside all judgment, blame, and any discussion of “We’ve tried that before” or “It’s too expensive” or “We’ll never sell that to upper management.”
Osborn wisely noted that if the team’s goal is high quality, people will choke or freeze up because it is simply not possible to will ourselves to generate breakthrough ideas on demand. So, Osborn set aside quality and simply urged the group to generate lots of ideas, knowing that quantity might paradoxically lead to quality.
I have realized the same thing in my own research. If I tell a young PhD student who is developing a dissertation thesis to develop a paradigm-shifting idea, that student will surely jump out of the nearest window. However, if I tell him to think of three to four ideas that might have already been proposed, might be untestable, boring, or even politically incorrect, he can certainly do that.
I had my own wake-up call in 1995, when I was on sabbatical at the Center for Advanced Study in Palo Alto. The next-door scholar-in-residence was Gary Alan Fine, the prolific sociologist. It was June, and I had only managed to write two chapters of my first book. Meanwhile Gary was working on no fewer than four books and had had a prolific year of writing. I was dejected. One day Gary invited me into his writing cabin—a virtual cave of creativity. On the walls were hastily scrawled notes, and piles of papers covered the floor. The office looked somewhat like a scene from A Beautiful Mind, when John Nash (played by Russell Crowe) had holed himself up in a garage, convinced that he was at the center of a communist conspiracy. Gary then walked me over to one of the walls and explained how many pages he had written for each of his four in-progress books that day. It was clear that quantity was what he cared about. Then he looked at me and said, “At the end of a day, I’ve got something I can edit. It does not matter if it is good or bad. What matters is that something is on a page.” After that day in his office, I set aside my impossibly high standards and just started to put my ideas on the page, following Gary’s advice. I learned to go through many drafts and became a writer. I finished my first book in the next month, and in the next year, I wrote another. Whenever I feel stuck, I think back to that day in Gary’s office and his advice to just put something on paper.
Of all of his wise rules, Osborn’s principle of synergy best captured his deeply held belief in the power of the creative team. According to Osborn, because all of the ideas belong to the team, anyone should feel free to modify, extend, connect, and otherwise build on the ideas of others. The concept of building involves combining ideas. It’s the truly synergistic aspect of groups. The synergistic combination of ideas is what is meant when we say the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts.
Paul Paulus’s research team undertook an analysis of the building concept in brainstorming. People were presented with either a list of rare or common ideas to combine and build on. They did this as either individuals or groups. Sure enough, groups generated fewer combinations (builds) than did nominal groups. However, the groups were more creative when combining rare ideas. The message? Groups benefit best from building on rare ideas.
In my courses, I often refer to Osborn’s original four rules as first-generation brainstorming or brainstorming 1.0. They are worth their weight in gold—they have improved the performance of creative teams perhaps more than any other practical prescription. At the most basic level, they are effective because they are rules—and there is plenty of evidence that groups that have rules outperform groups that do not have rules, even if the rules are not ideal. Over and above that, these four rules are particularly valuable in their own right. Indeed, the scientific evidence strongly indicates that groups who use these four rules are more creative than groups who don’t.
Of all the rules, it is the quantity goal that is the most important. Brainstorming rules alone do not convey a distinct advantage over even a vague quantity goal (presented alone) in terms of enhancing fluency. However, brainstorming rules are definitely useful adjuncts to specific, difficult quantity goals.
The practice of brainstorming is so ingrained in most organizations today that most people claim to know the cardinal rules of brainstorming by heart. Most people believe that it is important to suggest wild ideas, encourage others, and have no rules. However, only about 50 percent of this advice is backed up by research. To make matters worse, what people believe brainstorming is and what they actually do are noticeably different.
What I see most often in company brainstorming meetings is a flagrant violation of the cardinal rules of brainstorming. Brainstorming sessions often fail to separate idea generation from idea evaluation, and a few people usually dominate the discussion. I’ve also witnessed a well-intentioned group leader charging the group to think of ideas that are “very new and very useful.” That leader has just planted the seeds for self-censoring and a fruitless meeting, with people too petrified to speak up.
In this section, I introduce some additional rules to Osborn’s original four tenets. Think of these new guidelines as supplements to the original four—not replacements. Just as when a software developer releases an improved operating system or utility, creativity scholars have continued to improve and perfect upon the original rules. Thus, I refer to these improvements and refinements as Brainstorming 6.0. Over fifty years have passed since Osborn’s book was published, and his cardinal rules have withstood the test of time. Nevertheless, Paul Paulus, professor at University of Texas at Arlington and author of Group Creativity: Innovation Through Collaboration, wondered whether there might be some additional, highly practical rules that companies and teams could adopt that would supplement Osborn’s original four. After observing that people in teams often are verbose and drift off topic, Paulus and his colleagues designed a clever experiment to test the efficacy of four new brainstorming rules. They coached some groups to follow Osborn’s original rules and other groups to follow not only Osborn’s rules, but also the four new rules:
- Stay focused on the task.
- Don’t tell stories or explain ideas.
- When no one is suggesting an idea, restate the problem and encourage ideas.
- Encourage those people who are not talking to make a contribution.
The results of the study were powerful and straightforward; the new rules generated a huge return on investment. Groups that followed the additional rules generated nearly 50 percent more ideas (quantity increase). Groups that followed the 6.0 rules also generated a greater number of unique ideas. One of the most profound changes that happened in the new-rules groups was that they used their time more efficiently. They expressed ideas in about sixty words, while groups using the traditional brainstorming rules generally used over 120 words to express an idea! Most people who have stomached a long, bloated company meeting can appreciate parsimony.
Facilitators have a huge effect on the productivity of face-to-face (FTF) brainstorming groups. Groups with a facilitator outperform groups that do not have a facilitator. And face-to-face groups generate as many ideas as nominal groups when they are assisted by a trained facilitator.
When choosing a facilitator, it is important to have someone who is regarded as unbiased and trustworthy. It is best if the facilitator focuses purely on process and resists inserting substantive ideas. The facilitator should make it clear what the working rules of the meeting are and, ideally, demonstrate what constitutes a rule violation. Most important, the facilitator must be a good umpire; this means that the facilitator won’t be popular and liked by everyone, but must call them as he or she sees them.
It is important to set aside discussions of quality, value, and acceptability in a pure brainstorming meeting and instead, focus purely on volume. Quality is elusive; quantity is attainable. And, the data speak for themselves. Groups that are given a realistic, stretch goal of quantity outperform those that are not given a quantity or quality goal. Paul Paulus’s team compared four types of groups: groups that had no goal/focus, groups that had a quantity goal, groups that had a quality goal, and those that aimed for both quantity and quality. Those given the quantity goal performed dramatically better than the other three types of groups!
Left to their own devices, real groups don’t seem to set quantity goals. But when they do, they are much more effective. And, if their goals are based on what a nominal group actually achieved, the productivity gap narrows. Indeed, the productivity gap that usually exists between interactive groups and nominal groups can be eliminated by giving interactive groups a performance standard comparable to that attained by a typical nominal group. When the goal is perceived as extremely challenging, creativity is enhanced.
Thus, quantity goals improve the performance of groups. But what about the goal of generating unusual ideas? The goal of generating novel solutions also improves group performance. In one investigation, the performance of groups following Osborn’s rules of brainstorming was compared with that of groups that were given the task of coming up with novelty goals—unusual or unique ideas that are unlikely to be mentioned by others. In this field experiment, specific novelty goals, whether presented alone or in conjunction with brainstorming rules, improved creative performance. The practicality and effectiveness of participants’ ideas were measured by blind coders—who were unbiased in terms of evaluating ideas. Novelty goals did not simply improve the quantity of ideas generated; in fact, the novelty goals improved creative idea generation.
Because most people have not been trained in brainstorming, the mere experience of being in a brainstorming group does not in any way guarantee that they will engage in best practices. When done right, a brainstorming meeting is very different than a regular meeting, and it should feel different. For this reason, I am careful to coach leaders to change gears and bring in very specific tools when the goal is brainstorming, as opposed to problem solving or crisis management. One study trained people in idea generation skills and then compared the creativity of groups specifically trained in idea generation skills with those who had simply been given an equivalent amount of practice (without formal training). Training had a significant, positive effect on creative fluency and originality. The groups who had been trained in idea generation brainstormed more ideas and more original ideas than did groups who simply practiced without training.
Another investigation examined the impact of experiential training on creativity. Specifically, the productivity of groups who engaged in an experiential learning training program was compared to groups who did not have experiential learning and groups who simply brainstormed. The groups who learned brainstorming through experiential learning had significantly higher quantity and quality scores and they also implemented more of their ideas.
One way of encouraging idea-generation skills is through the use of word association. Hamit Coşkun, a professor at Abant Izzet Baysal University in Turkey, examined how word associations that are closely related (such as apple/pear) might actually stimulate greater creativity than remote associations (such as apple/fish). Two groups of people both did a ten-minute word-association warm-up immediately before a brainstorming session. One group warmed up by free-associating to closely paired words; the other group warmed up by free-associating to distantly paired words. The group that warmed up using the close associations generated more ideas, more categories, and deeper ideas than did the groups that were given the remote associations.
All in all, it makes sense for leaders and their teams to take the time to learn the unique rules of idea generation. Do not assume this is obvious. If necessary, spend a day or half a day training one group, tape the training, and then use that as a training device for future groups. I find the best way to teach a new behavior is to show it in action.
Brainstorming (ideation) is one thing. But, what about choosing ideas from a list of brainstormed ideas? Sounds easy, right? Hardly. For most people, idea selection is not significantly better than chance! Most people tend to select ideas that are feasible and desirable, at the expense of originality. Not surprisingly, when people are explicitly instructed to select creative and original ideas, they are better at choosing and selecting the best ideas. Some might argue that interactive groups might have an edge when it comes to idea selection. However, there is absolutely no scientific evidence that interactive groups are better at selecting ideas as compared with nominal groups. In fact, if anything, nominal groups are more likely to select original ideas. In another investigation, nominal groups generated more ideas and more original ideas than interactive groups but there were no differences in terms of idea selection.
Some people in organizations may reject creative ideas, even when they have personally encouraged their team to be creative! According to researcher Jennifer Mueller and colleagues, people can hold a bias against creativity that is not necessarily overt and can be unconsciously activated when people try to reduce uncertainty. Indeed, when people feel uncertain, they often favor practicality instead of creativity when attempting to recognize a creative idea.
When presented with the (depressing) research that indicates that individuals are superior to teams when it comes to creativity, many people conclude that teams should be dismantled. I politely disagree. Rather, I strongly advocate using a hybrid structure for the creative team process. A hybrid structure combines different modes in a particular sequence that I’ll discuss here: alone-then-group, rotating membership, meet-the-new-kid, and multiple subgroups.
Is it best for people to work first in a group and then individually or vice versa? The data are clear on that point: it is best for people to first work independently (doing brainwriting, for example) and then work together in a group. In fact, people who first brainstorm alone and then move to a group are more creative than those who first work in a group and then independently. Similarly, solitary idea generation prior to group brainstorming is better than group brainstorming followed by solitary idea generation. Thus, a winning hybrid structure is the alone-then-group model. Indeed, groups organized with the alone-then-group hybrid structure generate more ideas, better ideas, and are better able to discern the quality of ideas they generate.
In one set of intriguing experiments, University of Pennsylvania students were divided into groups of four to brainstorm new product concepts for a sports and fitness manufacturer and a home-products manufacturer. The teams were given thirty minutes to brainstorm using a traditional (group only) process. Then, teams were instructed in a hybrid process that involved two distinct phases: ten minutes generating and ranking ideas individually, then twenty minutes discussing the ideas in a group. Their ideas were then evaluated by three separate blind panels. The results? The average quality of the ideas generated by the hybrid process were better than those that came from the traditional process by the equivalent of roughly 30 percentage points. The hybrid process generated three times more ideas than the traditional method in the same amount of time. In addition, the quality rating was higher for the top five ideas produced through the hybrid process.
One word of caution: when adopting an alone-then-group hybrid procedure, warn group members against exchanging ideas with one another during the group phase. Doing so reduces the categories of ideas that are explored in the group. This dampening effect is known as fixation, in which people tend to conform to ideas suggested. If this does happen, don’t fear, taking a break can stop the decline!
During one of our courses, a manager asked us whether company reorganizations help or hinder group creativity. The truth is, we didn’t know, because to our knowledge that research study had not been conducted. So my colleague, Hoon-Seok Choi of Sungkyunkwan University, and I devised a pretty simple simulation: we examined whether groups that stayed intact (i.e., did not experience membership change) would be more creative than groups with “open” boundaries (i.e., experienced membership change). We hypothesized that membership change would stimulate the permanent group members to think of new ideas. In short, we thought that the presence of newcomers might actually stir up original members’ old ideas or at least motivate these members to revisit old ideas in new ways. We systematically compared brainstorming teams that stayed intact to brainstorming teams that experienced at least one membership change. Otherwise, everything else remained the same. We found strong evidence that the groups that underwent membership change generated a greater volume of ideas and more flexible ideas than did groups that stayed intact. To be specific, there was a 22 percent increase in the total volume of ideas and a 31 percent increase in the number of different kinds of ideas.
One interpretation of these findings is that people who are new to a group are on their best behavior—perhaps in an effort to gain the respect of the group. Another interpretation is that simply the presence of newcomers facilitates new idea generation. To attempt to tease out which of these explanations was really the causal factor, we conducted a further investigation that examined how the presence of “old-timers” was affected by newcomers. If it was indeed the case that increases in creativity were driven by newcomers, then we should not see any increase in the creativity of old-timers. However, if newcomers spark new ideas in old-timers, we should see increased creativity among these folks. Indeed, that is exactly what we saw. When we taped the brainstorming sessions and removed the contributions made by the newcomers themselves, we saw that the old-timers experienced a surge in creativity. Specifically, there was a 94 percent increase in the number of ideas suggested by the permanent members when a newcomer entered the group (as compared with groups that stayed intact)! And there was a 68 percent increase in the cognitive flexibility of the permanent members. This study provides hard empirical evidence for the adage that new blood stimulates creativity!
Intact teams, like long-married couples who can complete each other’s sentences, often get set in their ways. As they work together, teams develop mental models that guide how they solve problems. Unfortunately, team mental models developed through repeat collaboration may interfere with processes that produce creative abrasion. Creative abrasion is the process whereby idea generation occurs because of the group’s composition of different people and personalities—because these people actually spur one another to generate new and unique ideas. Recall the advice in chapter 3 to make groups more heterogeneous. The development of the Apple Macintosh computer provides an example. Steve Jobs put together a team of engineers who were also qualified in disparate fields such as art, music, and philosophy. The diversity of the team and the varying thoughts that each individual brought to the team helped to create an atmosphere that did not always bring harmony, but helped to inspire a machine that would soon be in almost everyone’s home. Cirque du Soleil CEO Daniel Lamarre believes that traditional brainstorming sessions are ineffective, and insists that a certain degree of tension and creative friction leads to innovation breakthroughs. Accordingly, Cirque du Soleil hires people in their early twenties who have opposing viewpoints, and provocative disagreement is both tolerated and cultivated. Another way to view this concept is to think of the adage “opposites attract.” Many times we may look at a group of people and think they would never work well together but they end up making beautiful music together. Such creative abrasion can be stimulated with rotating team membership or the introduction of a temporary visitor.
Competition is another way to spark creativity. In a study of the performance of seventy four-person groups in an idea-generation task, Markus Baer of Washington University examined how competition with other groups affected the creativity exhibited by “open” groups (i.e., those that experienced membership change) and “closed” groups (i.e., those that did not experience membership change). Competition with other, outside groups showed a U-shaped pattern in open groups (with creativity greatest with low and high levels of competition), but the pattern was distinctly different for the closed groups. For closed groups, only low competition (with outsiders) increased creativity. The implications for creative collaboration are that it is key is to consider both the composition of the group (open or closed) and the level of perceived competition with outside groups: if the group is closed, then competition should be minimized. However, if the group is open, competition can be heightened.
Another way that a hybrid structure may be created is with the use of multiple subgroups within a larger group. For example, a larger, clumsy team of twenty-five people might create four or five subgroups to work on a given problem. Once this structure has been decided on, the question is whether each group should complete the entire process from start to finish and combine their results at the end (parallel mode) or have each group build on the work provided by previous subgroups (serial mode). The choice depends on whether you want to maximize the variety of new ideas (flexibility) or elaborate and expand upon particular ideas. Groups using serial mode produce more elaborations than parallel groups, but parallel groups produce a greater number of unique ideas than serial groups.
There would be no problem with creativity if people simply would not grow up. In one investigation, people were asked to write about what they would do if they had a day off from school now or as their seven-year-old selves. The first group recorded mundane activities, such as catching up on sleep, getting some work done, etc. However, the second group listed things such as buying the biggest lollipop they could find or spend the day playing with friends. The group that wrote about their seven-year-old self performed better on a test of creativity.
Even thinking about being old can affect our behaviors in unconscious ways, through a mental process called priming. Indeed, John Bargh of New York University flashed pictures of older people on a computer screen at such a high rate of speed that they were not detectable—consciously, that is. However, unconsciously, the image of the old person triggered a chemical reaction in the brain that resulted in people walking significantly more slowly down a corridor. Apparently, the mere idea of age and aging not only triggers subconscious images and thoughts of slowing down, it affects behavior as well.
Osborn’s cardinal rules of brainstorming admonished people to not criticize their own and others’ ideas. This seems like pretty straightforward advice. Yet, when we think about the problems that can result when groups avoid conflict and agree too readily with one another, the advice about setting aside judgment may breed another pernicious group problem—groupthink or excessive like-mindedness. In chapter 6, I recounted Jerry Harvey’s tale of the fateful trip to Abilene. If only the family members had spoken up and argued the drawbacks of traveling down the dusty highway, they might have prevented such a senseless waste of a day. The 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco is a textbook classic for every student of groupthink. Several members of John F. Kennedy’s cabinet harbored serious doubts about the far-fetched plan, yet dared not speak up in the presence of their charismatic leader. Dissent, debate, and competing views can ward off excessive like-mindedness in a group, groupthink, and a number of other problems.
World-renowned creativity and brainstorming expert Charlan Nemeth of the University of California, Berkeley, decided to put Osborn’s “no evaluation” prescription to the test. In a carefully designed series of studies, Nemeth compared groups who challenged and criticized each other with those who didn’t. Thus, some groups were told to debate and even openly criticize one another, and others were advised to not criticize each other. Overall, there was value in both kinds of instructions—as compared with simply not giving any instructions! However, in general, groups that debated and criticized each other outperformed the groups that followed the guidance to not criticize and judge one another. In other words, granting teams permission to criticize and debate resulted in higher creativity than traditional brainstorming instructions.
However, there is an important caveat involving the type of criticism team members level at one another. Creativity is higher when group members give negative evaluations of ideas, but not negative evaluations of the source of ideas. Consider for example, the difference in the following two statements: “Hey, Joe, I don’t see how it will work to put an electronic shifter on the bike” versus, “Joe does not know what he is talking about.” When people criticize ideas but not sources, groups are more creative than when they withhold all evaluation. Moreover, group members are more satisfied when working under conditions of idea-targeted negative evaluations rather than source-targeted or no evaluation. The message for creative collaboration is to be critical of ideas, but respectful of the people.
It is important to think about your style of criticizing ideas. If you are going to be negative, it is better to be sarcastic rather than simply angry. In one field study simulating customer calls to service centers, customers were either angry (e.g., “Your service is extremely inefficient!”) or sarcastic (e.g., “Your service is fast as a turtle! You make deliveries only between 9 a.m. and 12 p.m. These hours are just perfect for working people!”). The service people were then asked to solve a series of problems. Those who were the targets of anger were better at analytical problem solving, but worse at creative problem solving. Conversely, the targets of sarcasm were better at solving creative problems because the sarcasm stimulated complex thinking and attenuated the otherwise negative effects of anger.
Sometimes, brainstorming tasks can be quite overwhelming, so it’s important to break the problem down into manageable parts. Groups can more easily tackle a problem broken down into more bite-size pieces. In one investigation, people were either presented with a simultaneous display of problems at their school (e.g., classes, parking, campus activities) and told to brainstorm about how to improve on them, or they were given a sequential display of the same school problems three minutes apart. The students who were given the sequential display of problems came up with twenty ideas and the students who were given all the problems at once only came up with ten ideas over a thirty-minute period. The implications for creative collaboration are clear: most organizations often face what appear to be monumental challenges—e.g., regaining market share, cutting costs, etc. These problems can be overwhelming unless they are broken down into manageable subparts to attack.
One big challenge with brainstorming is that groups quickly run out of steam. For example, one study examined several innovation projects following the actual processes of professional designers. The frequency of idea production (fluency) remained roughly constant during the first thirty minutes, but then steadily declined after this period. More disconcertingly, the number of appropriate (feasible) ideas decreased rapidly, such that 75 percent of the appropriate ideas emerged in the first fifteen of the thirty total minutes. Thus, groups quickly become depleted.
The solution to the depletion problem is to stimulate the group. By stimulation, I mean introducing words, pictures, suggestions, different postures, and so on to a group. Such stimulation maintains and, in many cases, increases the frequency of idea generation. Moreover, the stimuli also helps generate more appropriate ideas. Singer Jack White designed his recording studio and office space, Third Man Records, entirely from scratch in order to stimulate his own sense of creativity. The décor reflects his quirky junk-art aesthetic: African masks and shrunken heads from New Guinea; antique phone booths and vintage Victrolas. Inside, the walls that face west are all painted red, and the ones that face east are all painted blue. The exterior, meanwhile, is yellow and black (with a touch of red) with a Tesla tower sitting on the roof. The inside holds secret passageways as well as mounted heads of bison, a giraffe, and a Himalayan tahr. All these trappings help create a unique surrounding and mind space for White and his band members.
Groups that are cognitively stimulated are more creative than those left to their own devices. There are many ways to cognitively stimulate groups. For example, in one investigation, people who were exposed to ideas on audiotape as they were brainstorming generated more ideas. Exchanging ideas with fellow group members does not appear to be as helpful in increasing creativity. In fact, groups given an opportunity to exchange ideas are no more creative than groups not allowed to exchange ideas.
Exposing people to stimulus ideas that are diverse (as opposed to homogeneous) improves creativity. Providing examples of possible solutions to problems also enhances creativity. For example, Christina Shalley of the Georgia Institute of Technology conducted a study in which groups were challenged to find solutions to management problems. They were given either a creative example of a solution, a standard (traditional) example, or no example. The creative example was the most effective: people had higher creativity and intrinsic motivation when given a creative example. Those not given an example were the least creative.
A study by Hamit Coşkun examined the effectiveness of two different exercises: divergent (generating many words on differences for given dual words) and convergent (generating many words on similarities for given dual words). For example, suppose you are given the pair butter/cheese. You would either be asked to generate differences between these words or similarities. People who first did the convergent (similarity) followed by divergent (differences) exercise were more creative than those who did the exercise in reverse, but only when they had first done a divergent thinking exercise. Similarly, divergent thinking with closely linked word associations produced the highest brainstorming performance as compared with convergent thinking style and distant associations. The takeaway is that groups should warm up or practice doing divergent exercises, and then attempt to find similarities, if they want to pump up their creativity.
Deep exploration is a particular priming process in which people dig deep down into a category; this is in contrast to a random process in which ideas just come to mind randomly. People in one study went into deep exploration when they were given subcategories of a brainstorming topic prior to a brainstorming session. Priming improves both productivity and originality on the category.
It is important for team leaders to not be limited when it comes to cognitively stimulating the group. It is not necessary to have access to fancy computers, videos, or graphics. Bill Maddux and his colleagues devised a clever technique for people to simply use their own memories as a type of cognitive stimulation. In their investigation, people were asked to recall a multicultural learning experience. Presumably, people who have lived abroad have developed more memories and experiences than people who have only traveled abroad. Indeed, those who have lived abroad were able to creatively leverage their cultural experiences—they were more creative when they recalled their multicultural experiences compared to those who had not lived abroad. Thus, priming or activating these memories enhances creativity on insight, association, and generation tasks.
Most teams work to fill their time. Even more disconcerting, research indicates that left to their own devices, teams will use whatever time is allotted to them, without appreciable differences in performance! One investigation compared how groups performed over a series of creative tasks in which the time period increased, decreased, or stayed the same. The most creative groups were ones in which time pressure increased over trials. For these reasons, I routinely put a clock in the room when I work with teams. Whenever I’m conducting a brainstorming session, I always put the group on a clear, but tight, time schedule.
Ambassador Winston Lord worked for Henry Kissinger for several years as a staff aide. On several occasions, after Lord wrote a speech for Kissinger, Kissinger would tell Lord, “this is not good enough.” Lord would then go back, dig deeper, and write a much better speech. On one occasion, Kissinger rejected eight of his drafts, until Lord reached a point at which he told Kissinger, “Henry, I’ve beaten my brains out—this is the ninth draft. I know it’s the best I can do: I can’t possibly improve one more word.” Kissinger then replied, “In that case, now I’ll read it.” The point of this story is that Lord had failed to realize his potential until Kissinger rejected his attempts and sent him repeatedly back to the drawing board.
I often challenge my students and clients by first asking them to do a simple ten-minute brainstorming task. We count how many ideas they generated and score the uniqueness of their ideas. They are often quite content with their performance. Then I annoy them by asking them to double their performance in the next ten minutes. It is rather daunting task to ask for a 100 percent increase in productivity in ten minutes. I give them a few minutes or so to conspire how they can accomplish this task. What is interesting is the immediate and powerful changes teams make in their group structure. They often employ brainwriting in addition to brainstorming; they throw practicality and usefulness aside, and even set benchmarking standards for themselves (one idea every five seconds, etc.). They also look different. They lean in more to the group, they smile, there are bursts of laughter, and the energy level is much higher.
In my research, I have found that 93 percent of groups are able to increase their per-person productivity in the ten-minute challenge. Even more impressive, the average productivity increase is 57 percent! Just imagine what a 57 percent increase would mean in your team’s productivity. What’s clear to me is that much of the time people are not nearly working to their full potential. This is the difference between optimizing and satisficing. Herbert Simon introduced the concept of satisficing in his Nobel-Prize winning research when he observed that many people take shortcuts, meaning they do just enough to make a reasonable decision and stay out of trouble. Simon contrasted satisficing—doing just enough to get by and meet minimum goals and standards—with optimizing, which is to fully attain one’s potential and use all available information and resources. When our performance is OK or satisfactory, we get comfortable. Too comfortable. A key part of creative collaboration is tapping into your creative potential and optimizing the creative ideation process. Your creative potential is much higher than you think it is. I have typically found that most people work at less than 50 percent of their actual potential.
Speedstorming is a method of brainstorming not unlike speed dating. In speedstorming, groups of pairs work together for three to five minutes brainstorming. Then, like speed dating, when the allotted time is up, one person moves to the left and a new group is formed and the process starts all over again. Speedstorming combines an explicit purpose, strict time limits, and one-on-one encounters to create a dynamic setting where ideas can be explored across people from different disciplines and potential collaborators can be quickly evaluated. A direct comparison of speedstorming and brainstorming indicates that ideas from speedstorming are more technically specialized and participants are more certain in their assessment of the collaboration potential of others.
What about groups that do not have a specified time limit? When people are asked, “How do you know when to stop brainstorming?” they often look at you curiously and simply say, “When the time is up” or “When it’s over.” Actually, these responses are incorrect. Neither satisfaction nor enjoyment predicts how long people work. Rather, the answer is determined by the size of the group. As a general rule, persistence on a task increases as the size of the group increases. In one investigation, groups of varying sizes were given a creative task without a stop rule. The bigger the group, the longer they worked. Specifically, a comparison of individuals, dyads (two-person groups), four-person groups, and six-person groups revealed that persistence increased as the group grew larger. Thus, larger groups were about as productive as individuals and small teams, but they took longer to produce the same amount of ideas!
When we move our body in a way that is bringing something to us or close to us—flexing muscles, such as a bicep curl—we activate the approach centers of the brain, which are conducive to creativity. Conversely, when we push something away from us—via extending movements—we activate the avoidance centers of the brain, which are not conducive to creativity. Using insights from brain activation research, Ronald Friedman and Jens Förster had people either flex or extend their arm muscles. The flexors were more likely to reach creative insights via contextual set-breaking (i.e., thinking outside the box), restructuring (conceiving new ideas by recombining old), and expanded mental search (envisioning more categories), whereas the extenders did not. Note: they also found that if the order of the day calls for analytical reasoning (such as solving equations that have correct answers), then it is better to stretch and extend the muscles!
The reason has to do with how we think about our goals. If we are focusing on goal promotion and moving toward a desired state, we are more likely to be in an exploratory, risk-taking mind-set. Conversely, if we are thinking about how to avoid an undesirable or disappointing outcome, we are in a prevention mode. A promotion focus leads to greater creative problem solving than does a prevention focus. It is worth noting that a person in a prevention-focused state might have similar levels of creativity as in a promotion-focused state, but only if he or she has unfulfilled goals.
How can you induce a promotion focus in you and your team? It may be easier than you think. One method is to simply focus on the prospect of positive outcomes (e.g., winning an award, gaining recognition). In other words, a promotion focus can be temporarily induced by merely thinking about a desirable goal. For example, the team might be encouraged to think about the best possible outcome they could achieve. Alternatively, a promotion focus can also be temporarily induced through a flexing motion, such as described by the bicep study above.
Sometimes, people become excessively preoccupied with situations they want to avoid. As noted, such a prevention focus is not conducive to creativity. If you sense that yourself or others are in a preventative mind-set (obsessing about avoiding negative outcomes, such as losing a client, etc.), quickly try to focus on realistic promotion goals. When you take the time to change your cognitive focus, this causes perceptible differences in brain activation. Indeed, people who focus on the prospect of positive outcomes have greater right hemispheric activation and diminished left hemispheric activation. The right hemisphere is responsible for creative, holistic thinking, whereas the left hemisphere is engaged for analytical, rational thinking. Think of it this way: if you are attempting to generate new ideas for a product or service then the right hemisphere is needed; however, if you are attempting to solve a math or logic problem, then the left hemisphere needs to be activated.
One type of thinking that people often engage in is counterfactual thinking, or thinking about what might have been had one taken a different course of action. For example, people might think about what their life might have been like if they had completed college, or taken that low-paying, but challenging job. Counterfactual thinking, as you might imagine, impairs the generation of novel ideas. However, it may have benefits for other types of noncreative problems. Thinking about what might have been prompts people to think about relations between a set of stimuli. The key here is to see connections between ideas that don’t appear obvious on the surface. For this reason, thinking about what might have been improves performance on analytic tasks involving logical relationships.
Might there be a way to boost creativity even when people think about the road not taken? There is! And it involves thinking about additive, rather than subtractive counterfactuals. One way of reversing the negative effects of counterfactual thinking on creativity is to use an additive counterfactual in which people think of new antecedent elements to reconstruct reality. On a practical level, suppose that for example, instead of just thinking about how life might have been different if she had graduated from college, that person might be induced to think about how seeking private tutoring sessions might have allowed her to focus more on her college coursework and eventually graduate. Conversely, subtractive counterfactuals involve removing antecedent conditions (e.g., the person might think about how graduation prospects might have improved had she not had to work at a part-time job). Additive counterfactual mind-sets enhance performance on creative tasks but subtractive counterfactuals do not.
These results again point to the central takeway for the leader of the collaborative team: know your goal. Creativity is quite a different goal than analytical problem solving. We’ve seen in this last section that if a group is working on a complex, analytical task involving logic and rationality, counterfactual thinking is an ideal warm-up. Conversely, if a team is working on a true brainstorming task, then counterfactual thinking is not ideal.
Up to this point, I have introduced several cognitive and behavioral techniques that can significantly improve the performance of creative teams. However, it is important to note that one of the most significant predictors of team creativity is whether that team has the support of the larger organization. And the data are clear: employees who receive support for creativity from both work (supervisors and coworkers) and nonwork (family and friends) are more creative. Indeed, when team managers and team members’ perceptions of organizational support are high and in agreement, team performance improves. Conversely, when team managers and team members disagree, negative affect increases and team performance suffers. The most negative effects occur when managers perceive that the team has more support than the team believes it does. Samples of senior executives identified four key norms associated with group innovation: support for risk-taking, tolerance of mistakes, teamwork, and speed of action.
There are at least three types of relevant organizational support: support from one’s own work group, support from one’s own supervisor, and support from the larger organization. Of all of these, it is work-group support and supervisor support that are the most instrumental in increasing creativity.
Chapter CapstoneI’ve introduced several ideas for enhancing creativity in your next team meeting. Most of these ideas do not require significant amounts of money, but they do require you to take a risk. There is a decent chance that one or more of your colleagues will laugh at your suggestion, make fun of it, or perhaps worse, try to kill it. This is where you need to stick to your plan and make sure that you don’t let the forces of inertia take over. One of my favorite lines to say is, “Look, I am committed to the success of our group. I am thrilled with how we work together, but I’m not sure we are tapping into our full potential. I want to try out some process ideas today that may sound silly, but they do have a basis in fact. Let’s consider today the first of several experiments. And, if anyone wants to try something new next week, I’m all for it.”