Where do great ideas come from...really? And how can you stifle brilliant thoughts before they have a chance to flourish? Associate professor George Newman joins the Executive Summary to share what the research actually tells us about how to foster — and kill — a creative buzz, and how to spark more innovation at both work and home in the year ahead.
Where do great ideas come from...really? And how can you stifle brilliant thoughts before they have a chance to flourish? Associate professor George Newman joins the Executive Summary to share what the research actually tells us about how to foster — and kill — a creative buzz, and how to spark more innovation at both work and home in the year ahead.
Show notes
[0:00] What comes to mind when you think of the word creativity? That paint-splattered easel? The next great novel? What about a simple innovative pitch to a company? Or a new way of approaching a formula? Creativity comes in many shapes, but ultimately, it’s all about bringing new ideas to the fore.
[0:55] Meet George Newman, an associate professor of organizational behaviour and HR management, and author of the new book How Great Ideas Happen.
[2:10] There are a few big mistakes we make when thinking about creativity – and the first is all about the “genius creator myth.”
[3:16] It turns out, when we think people are “born with” the creative gene, it really influences who is allowed to be creative, which is ultimately limiting to both individuals and organizations.
[4:16] Where do new ideas really come from? George’s research shows it’s not from within, but the world around us.
[5:20] It’s time to think of creativity as a path of discovery, rather than a lightning strike of brilliance.
[6:25] The second big mistake we make is jumping into brainstorming too quickly.
[6:50] We also prioritize the novelty of new ideas over value.
[7:50] To brainstorm better, you need to have a concrete plan. And George wants people to approach it like an archaeologist.
[8:41] First, survey the landscape.
[9:03] Second, create a “grid” or organize your thoughts.
[10:00] Third, dig in (aka, start throwing those ideas on a whiteboard!). And make sure you don’t quit before you get to the good stuff.
[11:33] The last big mistake in the quest for new ideas is soliciting feedback at the wrong time. Don’t get feedback while still generating ideas.
[12:41] Also, accept that there’s going to be some negative feedback along the way, and that you’re just going to have some bad ideas along the way too.
[14:28] Also, recognize that you’re your own worst critic.
[15:09] In the end, breakthrough ideas don't just manifest out of thin air. You have to sift through the layers of rubble, dust off plenty of false leads, so that every so often, you uncover something remarkable. The key is to keep going.
Be sure to check out the Executive Summary back catalogue. We tackle everything from how where you work influences the types of innovation you create to how to give better feedback.
Megan Haynes: When you hear the word creativity, what comes to mind? Maybe an artist in a paint-splattered studio or a writer staring at a blank page. We tend to think of creativity as something reserved for artists, designers or musicians. What if I told you that view of creativity is wrong? That it’s just as important in a boardroom as it is in a studio.
George Newman: Creativity is much broader, maybe, than kind of people might think about it. So it’s not just, you know, something that’s messy or that you have to put a smock on for that involves paint, thinking about creativity as, more generally, the process by which new and valuable ideas come into the world. And so that’s something that affects every industry, every sector. It’s how companies and organizations move forward, make innovations, both internally and externally, so it’s a much broader way in which ideas get better.
I’m George Newman. I’m a professor of organizational behavior here at Rotman.
MH: George studies creativity — the mechanics of it, how it affects our perceptions of art, music and literature, and of course, how it impacts companies and teams. He’s even written a book on the topic — How Great Ideas Happen — which looks at creativity as a linchpin for discovery. Understanding creativity is one thing. But figuring out how it sparks, and how to harness it, is another.
So where do new ideas actually come from? What’s the fastest way to kill a creative buzz? What are the biggest mistakes we make when thinking about creativity and innovation? And how can organizations put these ideas into practice?
Welcome to Executive Summary. I’m Megan Haynes, editor of the Rotman Insights Hub.
Musical interlude.
MH: If you think about it, creativity touches everything — from how we solve everyday problems, to how organizations tackle their biggest challenges.
It’s behind every new idea, product or process.
There are lots of ways to think about harnessing and applying creativity. Entire fields of study are dedicated to the skill. Yet despite its wide range, creativity — particularly in an organizational setting — is still misunderstood.
As George sees it, there are a few big mistakes we make when we think about creativity.
One of the most egregious is the continued persistence of the “genius creator myth.”
GN: A lot of people have an idea about creativity as something you’re just born with that’s very rare. You either have it or you don’t. That’s kind of the dominant view — that if you want to be creative, maybe you have this special gift, and to try to cultivate that special gift, you’re supposed to look deep inside and dig into a wellspring of inspiration and go forth and create.
MH: Think about it — we idolize Einstein, Da Vinci, Marie Curie for their genius contributions to science and art. But the truth is, most brilliance doesn’t happen in a vacuum by one single individual.
This myth ends up having a couple of negative effects on how we view and pursue creative moments.
First, when we lean into the genius creator ethos, as a society, we’re implicitly stating who is allowed to be a genius — those rare individuals who are born with that je ne sais quoi. More often than not, historically, that’s been viewed as white men.
GN: We tend to have biases that brilliance and being a genius is a very male type kind of trait, which the data don’t support at all.
MH: Some of George’s research has found that when companies use words like “brilliant” and “genius” in job descriptions, they actually discourage women from applying, effectively limiting the pool of candidates. So by embracing the idea that individuals are creative geniuses, companies actually miss out on potential talent from elsewhere.
The other thing that happens when we embrace this myth is we tend to sequester ourselves away in the hopes that inspiration will strike when we’re able to tap into our inner genius.
GN: For most of us, if we’re hitting a creative block, I think there’s a tendency to say, “Oh, I’m going to isolate myself. I’m going to get the noise-cancelling headphones and block out all distractions.”
So what the research tells us is something pretty much the exact opposite, which is creativity doesn’t come from sequestering yourself and going off to the isolated cabin in the woods and looking within. It really comes from how we interact with ideas that are all around us, and how we borrow from other people’s work and build on it with our own unique twist and tweak and personalization.
MH: So, sorry to break people’s bubbles here, but most new ideas are really just building on old ones. And to really gain access to those moments of creative iteration, we need to be engaging with the world around us.
GN: There’s also research that has looked at the trajectory of people’s careers and kind of what happens before people have their big break, whether that’s filmmakers or artists or even scientists, when they have their career-making discovery. And what that research shows is, right before that big discovery, they were engaged very much in a process of exploration and trying out a lot of different things.
MH: The genius creator myth also implies that you’re either born with it, or you aren’t; that it’s a skill you have or don’t.
In reality, creativity is something you can get better at just like any other skill — you might just need to reframe how you think about where new ideas come from. Instead of an innate power we have — just waiting for a lightning strike to spark — we need to think about creativity as a path of discovery.
GN: The genius myth, or kind of story, seems to be much more recent — like in the last century or so — kind of mythologizes these folks that had a big breakthrough when really there were a number of people that were involved in the process. It was very slow and iterative. It didn’t happen all at once. There was a lot of experimentation that went into it.
So, if you go back to ancient Rome and Greece, it seems like the way that they thought about creativity was much more this kind of discovery idea. The word invention — actually the root is discovery, inventio. And the idea there was that you were discovering different versions of the same idea along its trajectory.
Musical interlude.
MH: If creativity is a path of discovery, the second big mistake we make is when it comes to brainstorming. It turns out, you can’t just go into a sterile boardroom with a whiteboard and dry-erase marker and emerge three hours later with the next big thing.
GN: I would say some of the biggest ways in which people go wrong: one, they start brainstorming before they’ve really done a lot of careful thinking about what is this idea even going to be about, and who’s it for.
MH: Part of the issue is we often prioritize novelty over value.
GN: I’m going to do something totally new that nobody’s ever thought of before. And when we do that, what our research shows is that there’s a tendency to sacrifice value. And just to make that really concrete, we looked at 10 seasons of the show Top Chef and found that instances in which contestants said, “Hey, I wanted to do something really creative,” they were over twice as likely to get kicked off the show, have the worst-rated dish. What happens in those instances is that people say, “Oh, I’m going to do something really wild and out of the box.” But they don’t think about, “Oh, does it actually taste good?”
MH: Since we think of creative inspiration as a lightning strike rather than a process of discovery, many eschew the concept of planning to be creative.
GN: We think about creativity as something that’s supposed to be spontaneous, these lightbulb kind of moments, when, in reality, a lot of ideas come by a very systematic process of trial and error and slow, incremental tweaks.
MH: So here, George wants us — and companies — to have a plan. We can’t just jump into brainstorming without first doing some legwork. This is probably a good opportunity to introduce his model for creative idea generation: we need to start thinking like archaeologists.
GN: Archaeologists go through these stages of surveying their terrain and then making their search organized by stretching out twine and dividing it into squares. And then they go through each one of those squares and they dig up everything they can find. And then they go back later to see, hey, is there anything notable?
MH: We’re going to talk very high-level here — George has an entire book on this topic, and we have 15 minutes — and we want to recognize that there’s no single right way to approach creative idea generation. But for those who want to embrace their inner archaeologist, George recommends starting with surveying.
GN: Basically, where do we even start looking for a successful idea like. So we’re first surveying the landscape very broadly and saying, well, what kind of thing is this going to be? What type of business is it going to be?
MH: Or what kind of product are you planning on making? What kind of system do you want to create? This is the time to go out in the world and chat with others for inspiration. It’s also time to hone your problem-finding skills.
GN: One big theme I talk about is this notion of problem-finding — allowing problems to kind of emerge from what we’re seeing and we’re noticing around us.
And the work shows that ability to look for problems, to be a problem finder, is actually correlated with long-term success in a lot of different disciplines.
MH: Next, it’s time to organize your thoughts.
GN: So gridding is the process of making your search organized — so kind of really thinking very carefully about what are the different components of my idea or the problem that I’m working on, and then starting to search through that space as systematically as you can, with the idea being that you want to try out all of the different possibilities.
MH: This is also when you really want to think through what George calls “the guiding question.”
GN: It’s really important to understand the why behind what you’re doing. “Okay, now I’ve got my idea. Who’s it for? Why are they going to find it valuable?” And you refine that guiding question over time and start to make it more and more systematic before you then start generating a bunch of ideas.
MH: It’s only when you’ve done your survey and come up with a way to organize yourself that you can start brainstorming — or what George calls digging.
GN: Digging is now you’re just trying to get everything out of the ground.
MH: This is where you write everything on that whiteboard, throw those ideas at the wall. This part probably feels a bit more familiar — we’ve all been in brainstorming sessions before. But here, you want to avoid the next big mistake: stopping before you get to the good stuff.
GN: Brian Lucas and Lauren Nordgren at Northwestern found that we kind of have this bias to think that we’re going to run out of ideas — that if I ask you to brainstorm ideas for a fundraiser, say, okay, maybe I can come up with ideas for a couple of minutes. And what they find is that when people brainstorm, they’re able to keep going much longer. And the longer they go, actually the better their ideas get. They’re more likely to have a successful idea in later rounds that they didn’t anticipate earlier on in the process.
MH: So, once you think your idea reserve is tapped, push through and keep going. Your next great idea might be the one just around the corner.
GN: More is more. And in fact, there’s really interesting work showing that the people that have the most successful ideas also tend to have the most ideas. So it really is a numbers game.
Musical interlude.
MH: The final big mistake people make when it comes to fostering creativity is underestimating the role feedback plays in both helping and stifling the process.
GN: The last big mistake that people make, that I really see a lot of organizations making, is to critique ideas at the same time that they’re generating them. And what happens is that it really reduces just the number of ideas that people wind up suggesting overall. If the name of the game is more is more, if you start to critique during that process, you really diminish the amount of ideas in the end.
MH: When it comes to evaluating ideas, the timing of that feedback really is critical. In George’s view, the idea generation process and the evaluation process — or what he calls sifting, to take it back to the archaeology metaphor — should be completely separate.
So for organizations looking at R&D, that may mean refining processes so that feedback on ideas comes much later down the line rather than as you’re trying to develop them. For individuals, that means holding off on asking for feedback until you’re done coming up with ideas.
GN: I think a lot of people seek feedback too early when really what they’re looking for is kind of like belly scratches and encouragement to keep going forward, but then they get some very real, maybe harsh feedback that discourages them.
MH: And here, it’s helpful to remember that, like a lot of things in life, feedback is kind of like a bell curve.
GN: We’re going to get some really strong positive feedback, but also we should expect some strong negative feedback, and that’s just kind of an inevitability of how people react to things.
MH: So, if you know you’re going to get negative feedback, it’s okay to prepare for that — you can figure out where and how you’re going to integrate that negative feedback into the process, and you can set parameters for what you will and won’t adjust based on the feedback.
Importantly, don’t shun feedback entirely. While feedback should be separate from idea generation, it is a critical part of creativity, because without it, you’ll never see improvements.
GN: I talk about Dua Lipa, who for her album that had 11 songs on it composed 97, or Jordan Peele, who rewrote Get Out like 400 times. And so I think we vastly underestimate, for breakthrough ideas, they didn’t come fully formed.
MH: It’s a bit freeing, really, to embrace the idea that you’re going to have some stinker ideas on the road to a breakthrough. You’re actually giving yourself permission to learn from what’s not going to work as you narrow it down.
GN: No idea is bad. In fact, I talk about the importance of, you know, getting good at bad ideas. The same way you’re digging stuff out of the ground. Well, it’s just as useful to say, well, that’s not it, that’s not it, that’s not it, because you’re getting that much closer to finding a thing that might really work. So kind of embracing this notion that most of what you generate is going to be bad and not usable, and you’re kind of working through that process to find the few gems that are there.
MH: Finally, it turns out, when it comes to selecting the best ideas, we’re often our own worst critics.
GN: Justin Berg at the University of Michigan has some really fascinating work where he had people brainstorm different types of ideas, and then they selected what they thought were their best ones, and then passed them off to somebody else, and other people rated which ones were the best. And reliably, he actually found that people’s most popular ideas were not the ones that they themselves ranked as number one.
MH: Instead, the most popular or best-ranked idea tended to be a person’s third or fourth personal choice.
GN: It often takes somebody outside of us, or maybe several people outside of us, to say, oh yeah, there’s a lot of promise there. I think you should focus in this direction.
MH: In the end, breakthrough ideas don’t just manifest out of thin air. You have to sift through layers of rubble, dust off plenty of false leads, so that every so often, you uncover something remarkable. The key is to keep going.
Musical outro.
MH: This has been Rotman Executive Summary, a podcast bringing you the latest insights and innovative thinking from Canada’s leading business school.
Special thanks to associate professor George Newman. Join us next month as we chat with associate professor Hong Luo about how social movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter shape company innovation.
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This episode was written and produced by Megan Haynes. It was recorded by Dan Mazzotta and edited by Avery Moore Kloss.
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