But creativity requires preparation, persistence and vulnerability. Below, Kellogg School faculty offer research and insights on ways to inspire creativity, collaboration, and innovation in yourself and your team.
1. Boost creative confidence
Do you think you’re funny? Are you confident in your ability to crack a joke better than a comedian? What if this comedian … is an AI?
Well, a new study by Jake Tinneyan assistant professor of marketing at Kellogg, and a colleague found that people were more confident in their ability to complete a creative task after seeing the same work credited to artificial intelligence versus a human. This is partly because people have a preconceived notion that AI is less creatively capable than real humans.
“If you take exactly the same high-quality or low-quality work, you’ll see this effect—that people think 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,” says Teeny.
While AI may not be human, humans often compare its abilities to their own. And because confidence is an important driver of innovation, knowing that we can outsmart AI has a reinforcing effect on human creativity.
“A lot of our self-perceptions are based on how we compare ourselves to others,” she says. “If we’re exposed to people who we think are really good at something, we might think, ‘Oh, I’m not that good at that. [task] as I thought I was.’ But if we’re exposed to people who do something badly or who we think are less competent, we think, “I’m really really good at this.”
However, increased confidence does not necessarily mean increased ability or better performance.
“Showing people AI-generated content can help them try things or make an effort; it gets the train out of the station,” says Teeny. “But it may not help it accelerate or reach a different destination.”
2. Use vulnerability to stimulate creativity
While confidence can get your creative juices flowing, a little self-deprecation can also lower your barriers to self-censorship.
In a recent study, Professor Kellogg Leigh Thompson and colleagues found that starting 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’re having a brainstorming session, what you’re hoping is that people are pitching any idea, without judgment or evaluation,” says Thompson.
Thompson noticed that at the corporate retreats she facilitates in her consulting work, icebreakers meant to boost participants’ confidence often included them recounting their accomplishments. But he noticed that these sessions tended to backfire on the next brainstorm.
“When I wanted people to participate in a brainstorming session, they tended to self-censor because they had just heard about all these great achievements,” he says.
So she and her colleagues designed experiments to test the relationship between embarrassment and creativity. The researchers suspected that if people did share their embarrassing stories, they would be relieved of this feeling of impending doom and encouraged to stop censoring themselves. In both individual and group settings, starting with a disturbing story led to greater idea generation.
These findings could help managers stimulate creativity among their teams. Thompson recommends that managers consider starting their brainstorming sessions with the embarrassing story exercise. It not only promotes idea generation, but also engages people from the start.
“Automatically, people start listening and are more engaged,” he says. “There is an overwhelming desire to let it go [the storyteller] finish, because human history is never boring.”
3. Get creative to inspire collaboration
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 feel increasingly isolated personally and professionally from their colleagues.
“In many cases, at the institutional level, everyone is basically an ‘individual contributor.’ This encourages a weaker sense of community,” he says Florian Zettelmeyerprofessor of marketing at the Kellogg School. For workers, “this can create a dynamic where your closest professional relationships are with people you don’t see very often.”
So how can leaders deal with this isolation? Consider creating a “workshop setting” for these employees.
Zettelmeyer found that providing a structured environment for autonomous workers, who would otherwise work in isolation, had positive effects on their creative and collaborative outcomes. In his own Ad-Tech Research Labresearchers attend regular meetings where they share and offer feedback on each other’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 workshop members draft a document to share with the larger group. Essentially, the team reads this document in the meeting—not in advance—where they offer real-time feedback through the Google Docs feedback feature.
Creating this kind of lab environment helps develop a sense of community and shared investment among freelancers.
“You create this situation where there are more opportunities to talk about things that matter,” says Zettelmeyer. “Then when you see your colleagues down the hall, you have a good sense of where they are in their work. You’ve seen their progress and the challenges they’re facing.”
4. Keep brainstorming … even when you think you’re done
During a long brainstorming session, when do you think the best ideas emerge? Early, when everyone is still fresh? Or later, when the participants have dug deeper into their imaginations?
Many people believe that creativity declines over time, a phenomenon that Loran Nordgren, professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School, and Kellogg PhD graduate Brian Lucas call the “creative cliff illusion.”
“People think their best ideas come quickly and early,” says Nordgren. In fact, “either you see no drop in quality, or your ideas improve.”
To investigate this idea, 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 that 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 session? For Nordgren, there is a very simple takeaway.
“If you’re struggling, keep going,” he says. This and his previous 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.”
5. Make sure your teams take risks
Whether investing more or stepping out to be vulnerable, creativity and innovation is about taking risks. So how can companies encourage their employees to risk failure on projects that may offer high rewards?
Jeroen Swinkelsprofessor of strategy at the Kellogg School, and a colleague took on 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 in potentially innovative projects.
They found a sweet spot—an optimal employer-employee contract—with an incentive structure that provides strong rewards for high-value wins without harshly punishing low-value outcomes.
“You want to reward the ends,” says Swinkels. “You punish failure less than you used to. You reward great success more than you used to. But you also have to make it so that simply doing well is a little less comfortable and not as rewarding for employees as it used to be.”
In other words, public trumpeting of high-value results and courtesy of failure gave workers room to experiment and make significant progress.
“The way you get people to work hard is to have big rewards for big results,” says Swinkels. “And the companies that are also good at managing the failure process so that it’s graceful and survivable, and good at taking advantage of the projects that then succeed, are companies that are going to thrive.”
