A strict, or even loose, quality focus narrows the options. Quality requirements create smaller sets of ideas from which to choose. The smaller the set of ideas from which to develop and choose, the less likely it is that a truly great idea will emerge.
A related problem is the primacy effect: the strong tendency to be attracted to the first option that is suggested. There is a pervasive belief that the first idea is mission-critical for the creative enterprise—a misguided view of creativity that exaggerates the importance of the initial idea in developing a product. But Ed Catmull, president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios could not disagree more. According to Catmull, it is important to generate and sort through a mass of ideas—“it’s like an archaeological dig where you don’t know what you’re looking for or whether you will even find anything. The process is downright scary.” For that reason, I often try to get companies to avoid choosing the very first idea that is brainstormed.
Myth #4: Active brainstorming is necessary to generate ideas.
Idea exchange is a crucial part of creativity, and we sometimes lose sight of the fact that there are two key elements. First, people need to carefully process and understand the ideas in the group—this is known as attention. Second, they need to reflect on the ideas—this is known as incubation. Incubation refers to how our unconscious mind often works on a problem when we just can’t think about it anymore. This is why sometimes people think of a solution to a problem when they are in the shower or taking a walk—they are not thinking consciously about a problem, but unconsciously, they are solving it. This is important, because incubation gets shut out by another dynamic that affects brainstorming—fixation. This is the tendency to focus on a limited number of domains or kinds of ideas. Fixation is thinking inside the box! Unfortunately, the very act of brainstorming with other people tends to lead to fixation, as compared with brainstorming independently. Indeed, over time, the quality, variety, novelty, and quantity of ideas starts to decline in a group. However, taking a break can stop this slide.
Engineers Paul Horowitz and Alan Huang were both facing extremely vexing problems concerning designs for laser telescope controls and laser computing. After struggling with the problem for months, they both visualized a solution in their sleep. Similarly, in the 1950s, Don Newman, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was trying to solve a troublesome math problem. “I was … trying to get somewhere with it, and I couldn’t and I couldn’t and I couldn’t.” One night, he dreamed of the solution in his sleep and turned his dream into a published paper.
Studies of problem solving and incubation reveal that temporarily putting a problem aside and returning to it later can lead to more breakthroughs and superior performance than continuing to actively focus on the problem. Why? Steven Smith and Steven Blankenship of Texas A&M University argue in their forgetting-fixation hypothesis that correct solutions are made inaccessible during initial problem solving because we keep retrieving incorrect solutions. Thus, forgetting about a problem and focusing on something else can make correct (but dormant) solutions more accessible.
Myth #5: Brainstorming teams should work closely together and tear down boundaries.
Private space and solitude are out of fashion. In some companies, requesting private space might even raise concerns about your teamwork ability or whether you are a “team player.” Nearly all US workers spend significant time in teams, and 70 percent of us inhabit open-plan offices. Furthermore, in recent decades, the average amount of space allocated to each employee has shriveled—from five hundred square feet in the 1970s to two hundred square feet in 2010. When I went to primary school, our desks were in neat rows, and all my gear was loaded into my own space and sacks that hung on my desk; today, primary school classrooms are arranged in pods and rotated regularly. Yet, working physically close to others and removing all boundaries is in no way conducive to creativity.
Susan Cain notes in a 2012 New York Times article that Backbone Entertainment, a video game company in California, initially used an open-plan office, but soon realized that its game developers—the creative think tank of the organization—were not happy. So Backbone converted to cubicles, and those nooks and crannies soon allowed the game developers to think creatively.
Consultants Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister studied the Coding War Games, a series of competitions that test software engineers’ abilities, and compared the output of more than six hundred computer programmers at ninety-two companies. DeMarco and Lister discovered that the enormous performance gap between highly productive companies and less-productive companies was driven by how much privacy, personal workspace, and freedom from interruption that programmers had. Statistically, 62 percent of the best performers described their workspace as private, compared with only 19 percent of the worst performers. And 76 percent of the worst programmers said they were often “needlessly” interrupted, compared with only 38 percent of the best performers.
For all these reasons, the cave-and-commons workplace design may be ideal for team-based companies. In the cave-and-commons setup, people have common space to meet when needed and necessary, but they have their own private “caves” that they can retreat to for creative idea generation, which usually happens in solitude. This hybrid structure perfectly reflects the fact that the creative process is a fine orchestration of individual and group work. Let individuals think in their caves. Then let the team debate which of the ideas is the most valuable (this is when to bring the teams into the commons).
There is also a widely held related notion that the more time groups spend together, the more they will bond and perform well together. Think again. Karen Girotra, professor of technology and operations management at INSEAD, examined hybrid teams, in which individuals first worked independently and then together, and compared them with teams that worked only together. She found that hybrid structures led to more ideas, better ideas, and increased ability to discern the best-quality ideas.
Myth 6: Team members should first brainstorm as a group to get the creative juices flowing, then work alone.
People are under the mistaken impression that being in a group will supercharge idea generation and motivate them to think creatively. In fact, the opposite is true! It is nearly always better for people to work independently before moving into a group. Paul Paulus and his research team put this idea to the test by training people in several different modalities. Some people worked alone on a brainstorming problem and then moved into groups. Other people worked with groups and then moved to independent brainstorming.
The results were quite clear: those who worked independently before moving into groups had much better group brainstorming sessions! Why? The people who were alone initially in their own thoughts before moving into a team experienced much greater group creativity. When we are brainstorming alone, we are in a state of thought, not in a state of action. Conversely, when we work in teams, we start getting busy, making plans, and setting agendas—and this does not serve us well. By brainstorming alone first, the individual is not under the peer pressure of others. Moreover the individual does not have to pay attention to social cues or for that matter even listen to others. Rather, that person can think in a completely unfettered fashion.
Myth #7: People who are pro-social