Michael Meier
In any business, it helps to be creative. Whether you are brainstorming your next advertising campaign or trying to find an innovative supply-chain solution, upending your priors and charting new paths can result in big rewards.
But creativity takes preparation, persistence, and vulnerability. Below, Kellogg School faculty offer research and insights into ways to inspire creativity, collaboration, and innovation in yourself and your team.
Do you think you’re funny? Are you confident in your ability to land a joke better than a comedian? What if that comedian ... is AI?
Well, a new study by Jake Teeny, an assistant professor of marketing at Kellogg, and a colleague found that people were more confident in their ability to complete a creative task after they saw the same work being credited to AI versus a human. This is in part because people have a preconceived notion that AI is less creatively capable than real people.
“If you take the exact same piece of high-quality or low-quality work, you will see this effect—that people think that AI in general is worse at producing creative content. So when people compare themselves to AI after seeing the work, it boosts their confidence in their own creative abilities,” Teeny says.
While AI may not be human, people often compare its abilities to their own. And because self-confidence is an important driver of innovation, knowing that we can outwit AI has a reinforcing effect on human creativity.
“Much of our self-perceptions are based on how we compare ourselves to others,” he says. “If we’re exposed to people we believe are really good at something, we may think, ‘Oh, I’m not as good at that [task] as I thought I was.’ But if we’re exposed to people who do something poorly or who we believe are less skilled, we think, ‘I’m actually pretty good at that.’”
Yet increased confidence doesn’t necessarily mean increased capability or better output.
“Showing people AI-generated content may help get them to try things or make an effort; it gets the train to leave the station,” Teeny says. “But it may not help it speed up or reach a different destination.”
While self-confidence can get your creative juices flowing, a bit of self-deprecation can also lower your barriers to self-censorship.
In a recent study, Kellogg professor Leigh Thompson and colleagues found that kicking off a brainstorming session with an embarrassing story can act as a gateway to generating more—and more-creative—ideas than sharing a story that makes you feel proud.
“When you have a brainstorming session, what you’re hoping is that people are putting out any idea, without regard to any judgment or evaluation,” says Thompson.
Thompson noticed that in the corporate retreats she facilitates in her consulting work, icebreakers intended to boost participants’ confidence often included them recounting their accomplishments. But she observed that these sessions tended to have the opposite effect in the subsequent brainstorm.
“When I wanted people to engage in a brainstorming session, they tended to self-censor, because they’d just heard about all these great accomplishments,” she says.
So she and her colleagues designed experiments to test the link between embarrassment and creativity. The researchers suspected that if individuals actually aired their embarrassing stories, it would relieve this feeling of impending judgment and encourage them to stop censoring themselves. In both individual and group settings, starting with an embarrassing story led to greater idea generation.
“When I wanted people to engage in a brainstorming session, they tended to self-censor, because they’d just heard about all these great accomplishments.”
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Leigh Thompson
These findings could help managers spur creativity among their teams. Thompson recommends that managers consider beginning their brainstorming sessions with the embarrassing-story exercise. Not only does it promote idea generation, but it also engages people from the start.
“Automatically, people start listening and they’re more engaged,” she says. “There’s an irresistible urge to let [the storyteller] finish, because the human story is never boring.”
In many ways, today’s knowledge workers have it good—hybrid schedules, remote work, increasing autonomy in the workplace. But one downside of this new reality is that these workers increasingly feel personally and professionally isolated from their colleagues.
“In a lot of situations, at the institutional level, everyone is basically an ‘individual contributor.’ That fosters a weaker sense of community,” says Florian Zettelmeyer, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School. For workers, “this can create a dynamic where your most intimate professional relationships are with people you don’t see very often.”
So how can leaders remedy this isolation? Consider creating a “lab setting” for these employees.
Zettelmeyer found that providing a structured setting for autonomous workers, who otherwise would be working in isolation, had positive effects on their creative and collaborative outputs. In his own Ad-Tech Research Lab, researchers attend regular meetings where they share and offer feedback on one another’s work.
“When we all know what we’re working on, we can help raise everyone’s game,” says Zettelmeyer.
Another key protocol is the “no-presentation meeting,” where lab members draft a document to share with the broader group. Critically, the group reads that document in the meeting—not beforehand—where they offer synchronous feedback via the Google Docs comments feature.
Creating this kind of lab setting helps develop a sense of community and shared investment among independent workers.
“You create this situation where there are more opportunities to talk about stuff that matters,” Zettelmeyer says. “Then when you see your colleagues in the hallway, you have a good sense of where they are in their work. You’ve seen their progress and the challenges they’re dealing with.”
During a long brainstorming session, when do you think the best ideas arise? Early, when everyone is still fresh? Or later, when participants have dug deeper into their imagination?
Many people believe that creativity drops off with time, a phenomenon Loran Nordgren, a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School, and Kellogg PhD alumnus Brian Lucas call the “creative-cliff illusion.”
“People think their best ideas are coming fast and early,” Nordgren says. In fact, “you’re either not seeing any drop-off in quality, or your ideas get better.”
To research this concept, Nordgren and Lucas recruited a group of participants to complete a five-minute brainstorming task. A second group of people then rated the creativity of the ideas the first set of participants had generated.
While the brainstormers thought they would become less creative as the session went on, the opposite was true: their creativity—as rated by the second group of participants—actually increased.
What does this mean for your next brainstorming meeting? For Nordgren, there’s one very simple takeaway.
“If you’re struggling, keep going,” he says. This and his earlier research on creativity reveal that “our intuitions about how this process works are wrong, and that our best ideas are there. They just require more digging.”
Whether it’s investing more or going out on a limb to be vulnerable, creativity and innovation are about taking chances. So how can companies encourage their employees to risk failure on projects that may offer high rewards?
Jeroen Swinkels, a professor of strategy at the Kellogg School, and a colleague took up the question of how to motivate employees to take big leaps. The two researchers designed a mathematical model to better understand how companies could encourage both hard work and risk-taking on potential breakthrough projects.
They found a sweet spot—an optimal employer–employee contract—with an incentive structure that provides robust rewards for high-value wins, without harshly punishing low-value outcomes.
“You want to reward the extremes,” Swinkels says. “You punish failure less than you used to. You reward big successes more than you used to. But you also have to make it so that just-adequate performance is a little less comfortable and not as rewarding for employees as it used to be.”
In other words, publicly trumpeting high-value results and being gracious with failure gave employees room to experiment and make breakthrough advances.
“The way you get people to work hard is by having big payoffs for big outcomes,” Swinkels says. “And firms that are also good at managing the failure process so that it is graceful and survivable, and good at taking advantage of the projects that then succeed, are firms that are going to thrive.”
Fred Schmalz is the business and art editor of Kellogg Insight.
