If all this talk about AI threatening human creativity has you feeling a little exhausted (read: our last newsletter), I have a palate cleanser for you. Today, we’ll discuss a research-backed tip for keeping your own creative juices flowing.

The method is simpler than you think—all you need is a bit of time, according to a study from Loran Nordgren and coauthor Brian Lucas (their work was also covered in The Atlantic this month). Then, we’ll consider the wisdom of a new move to “democratize” data science.

The creative power of persistence

Here’s a familiar scenario: You’re sitting at your desk trying to come up with creative solutions to a problem. You rack your brain for a while, scribble down half a dozen ideas, and then hit a wall. Have you already reached your creative peak? Or should you force yourself to keep brainstorming?

All too often, people throw in the towel. And that’s a shame, according to Loran Nordgren, an associate professor of management and organizations at Kellogg.

“That feeling that you’ve kind of run out of ideas is inaccurate and, in a sense, shouldn’t be listened to,” Nordgren says.

In a series of studies, he and his colleagues find that people fundamentally underestimate the power of persistence in creative work. In one study, for instance, participants were asked to brainstorm creative ideas during two short time periods. After the first interval, they had an opportunity to predict how many ideas they would generate during the second interval.

The participants predicted they could come up with about ten more ideas during the second interval, but they actually generated about fifteen. Moreover, the ideas generated during the second part were judged to be more original than those generated initially.

The underestimation is particularly acute for highly creative tasks, the researchers find. Because creative work is nonlinear, it is not clear how close you are to a good solution and whether more effort will yield more ideas—so why continue?

This is even more true of tasks that are both creative and hard. In yet another experiment, the researchers found that the more difficult a creative task felt, the more people underestimated the number of ideas they could produce while persisting.

The practical, take-home message is that if you reach a point in a creative task where you feel stuck, ignore that instinct—at least for a while.

“Judge the quality of the solutions you have thus far, and if they’re inadequate, you should continue forward,” Nordgren says, “because there’s good reason to believe that there are better solutions out there.”

You can read the rest of the article in Kellogg Insight here.

The challenge of “data democratization”

These days, there are all kinds of new “low code” and “no code” tools that allow just about anyone to access sophisticated data-science techniques. For organizations struggling to hire a sufficient number of data scientists, empowering individuals across the organization to do their own analyses sure seems like a good thing.

But is it? Kellogg clinical associate professor Joel Shapiro isn’t so sure. Writing in Harvard Business Review, he makes the case that organizations should be more discerning in developing their ranks of “citizen data scientists.”

“When complexity and stakes are low, democratizing data makes sense,” he writes, particularly when individuals are encouraged to answer simple questions that pertain directly to their day-to-day jobs or domain expertise.

But for problems that are more complicated, or where precision really matters, or where the stakes are high, companies are taking a huge (and unwise) risk when they delegate to someone without formal training. “Giving the keys to everyone doesn’t make them an expert, and gathering the wrong insights can be catastrophic,” says Shapiro.

You can read the rest of his article here.