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Most people won’t admit that they hate creativity. I have asked hundreds of people—executives, managers, workers, students—in the United States whether they think creativity is valuable. That is, I asked them to rate the extent to which they thought creativity was important and valuable on a 1 to 7 scale where 1 meant not at all important/valuable, 4 meant not sure, and 7 meant extremely important/valuable.
Guess what I found? An astounding 95 percent of people who took my survey said creativity was a 5 or above on the scale. Virtually no one gave creativity an importance rating lower than a 4.
I next conducted an intensive search on articles about creativity in the popular press, and I did not find a single article that said creativity was a waste of time. Not one. Not only that, but I found just one media piece among the hundreds that I looked at that asserted that creativity is naive or misguided.
I started to take notice of what CEOs said about innovation, which invariably included phrases like “competitive advantage,” or “strategic advantage,” or “edge over our competitors.” In fact, I challenge you to find a single example of a CEO telling the media, “We do not want innovation. We do not care if our company offers customers creative solutions.”
If you look at investor reports and company mission statements and strategic plans, around 20 or 30 percent will say something positive about innovation. You will never hear any business representative claim or read a company newsletter that says, “We don’t want creativity here—that is not our job.”
So even though people profess to love creativity, we know that creativity isn’t all unicorns and rainbows. When you have to convince others to use a new idea and take a risk, all of a sudden the love affair ends. I’ve received so many emails from professionals telling me all the many different ways their creative ideas have been summarily and brutally rejected. So what could cause all these negative feelings about creativity, and why are they often hidden?
The first time I recognized my own bias against creativity was when I was teaching a class on, ironically enough, creativity. I had divided my MBA students into groups and had them engage in a brainstorming task commonly used in experimental research on creativity. The task was to have groups generate as many unusual uses as they could think of for a simple cardboard box. These brainstorming tasks usually involve around ten minutes of idea generation, followed by five minutes for each group to choose their best idea to present to the class.
Now, as you can imagine, I’ve heard the gamut of unusual uses before—everything from using the box material to make high-fashion clothing to using the box as a house to live in. So I was a bit unprepared when one team presented their best idea, one they were so excited about that they asked me what I thought as soon as they had presented it. Their idea: a solar oven.
When they asked me what I thought of their idea, something strange happened that has never happened to me before. Before I could stop myself, I said, “A solar oven? That makes no sense at all!” If you have ever done or said something stupid, like I did that day, you might also have experienced what I did after my comment landed. Everything suddenly slowed down, and then three things happened. The first was that my brain asked me why I had publicly blurted out such a strong negative reaction to the idea. The second, I looked at all my students’ faces; the students who had come up with the idea were understandably surprised, embarrassed, and uncomfortable. The third thing was that I tried to remedy my students’ discomfort by saying something that, unfortunately, sounded even more judgmental: “Does anything like that actually exist?”
One student stepped forward and patiently explained to me that solar ovens were commonly used in India to cook food, and the box form was indeed a common type of solar oven. But since the use of a box as a solar oven was new to most Americans, it met the definition of creative by being both novel and useful.
I was surprised and slightly horrified by my knee-jerk and resistant response. I had publicly criticized an idea that was actually great. And I had done it automatically, without thinking, as a reaction to not knowing something that, to me, was truly new. Because I had not yet learned how the bias against creativity works, or why, I wasn’t able to turn my poor response into a learning point. Instead I meekly dropped the discussion and moved on to the next topic.
As I looked back later on my odd behavior, two things struck me. First, I had scored extremely high on a scale called “openness to experience,” which measures a person’s general tendency to feel open to new ideas and to exploring them. So it made no sense to me that I—a theoretically highly open person who studies and loves creativity—could experience such a knee-jerk bias against creativity. Second, my reaction was so powerfully negative and happened so fast that I was hardly in control of it in the moment.
As I pondered what had caused my bias against creativity, I dug deeply into the academic literature to try to find answers. Sadly, the outcome of my deep dig made me feel pretty depressed. Academics all believe that expertise is the key to evaluating a creative idea. So by that measure, as an expert in creativity, I should be really good at evaluating creative ideas for a simulation I’ve run countless times, right? But since I clearly wasn’t, I wondered if the problem was with me.
I thought, maybe evaluating a creative idea was a different kind of task than evaluating a familiar idea. Maybe having expertise when evaluating a familiar idea does make a lot of sense. In fact, when you evaluate a familiar idea, having real expertise is key. But could expertise make it harder to evaluate—and embrace—a creative idea?
Experts in every field of endeavor make catastrophic errors in judgment all the time. Hewett-Packard rejected Steve Wozniak’s rough concept for the Apple II, a move that caused Wozniak to quit the HP job he loved and go to work for Apple full-time. Def Jam Records dropped Lady Gaga from its roster of artists, and today she is a megastar. Steven Spielberg’s application to the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts was rejected not just once, but twice. Dr. Seuss’s first book was rejected by twenty-seven publishers for being too “silly and different.”
When Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov first submitted their three-page paper about graphene—a new type of carbon-based material said to have greater conductivity and a lighter weight than silicon—it was rejected by Nature, a prominent journal in the sciences, for not being “a sufficient scientific advance.” The paper was instead published in Science, and Geim and Novoselov won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics. Clearly, the editor at Nature—surely an expert at determining which papers to accept and which to reject for publication—made a big mistake in this case and rejected the wrong paper.
These examples of creative ideas being rejected by experts—and many more just like them—are not flukes. One study looked at the three most prominent medical journals and found that they routinely rejected breakthrough papers in favor of papers with less novelty and impact. In fact, this study found that the journals in question rejected twelve of fourteen of the most important breakthrough papers published at the time. This means that editors read all fourteen breakthrough papers and disliked twelve of them so much that they didn’t bother sending them out to reviewers for further consideration. This general pattern of findings has been replicated many times. Another study found that novel ideas had a higher likelihood of being rejected even if they were of high quality. One paper in my field found that the most novel papers were rejected from a prominent management journal—but this finding was so well established that this paper was itself rejected for not being a “sufficient scientific contribution.”
Could experts be struggling when evaluating creative ideas? Laura Kornish at the University of Colorado Boulder and Karl Ulrich at the Wharton School collected data from a company called Quirky. The business model for Quirky encourages people to submit new ideas, to vote on which ideas they like, and then to vote on development decisions for specific ideas, which will then be commercialized and sold on the company’s website. The researchers took a subsample of ideas from the Quirky website and had a panel of seven experts—as well as a group of ordinary consumers—rate their purchase intent based on the early-stage models of the ideas. What they found was pretty astounding.
First, the experts didn’t agree with one another. Second, the expert ratings were not at all predictive of product sales, but the nonexpert consumer ratings were. In fact, a sample of four consumer ratings was just as predictive of product success as was a sample of four expert ratings. And all you needed were twenty consumer ratings to achieve significantly better predictive power than using a sample of experts. Another study found that a group of around forty indie moviegoers was far more accurate in predicting future box office returns than a group of thirty experts. What this suggests is that whatever experts know, it doesn’t necessarily help them accurately evaluate something new.
A study conducted by Page Moreau, Donald Lehmann, and Arthur Markman found that, relative to novices, experts in film technology rated a digital camera (a new technology in 1999 when the study was conducted) as having low product viability. Further, film experts rated a camera with incremental novelty (i.e., a film-based camera with new flash technology) as highly viable relative to novices, who felt the incremental camera had little value.
Another study found that highly experienced venture capitalists made poor investment decisions relative to those with a moderate level of experience. Yet another found that venture capitalists’ ratings of business viability for early-stage ventures did not predict whether these same ventures survived, grew, or were highly successful in the long term.
But how could this happen? Editors, professors, and business executives are experts—it is their job to recognize creative opportunity. So why do experts fail so often at making creative change?
How could experts fail to recognize creative opportunities when they should be great at recognizing them? Shouldn’t an expert know a lot about her field so she can easily pick out what’s new and vet whether the new is going to be useful?
In his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel would seem to agree with this view. According to Thiel’s approach, truly innovative ideas (like most innovation gurus, he does not use the term creative) are completely new—they go from 0 (never having existed) to 1 (existing). According to Thiel, if a product goes from version 1 to version 2 or even from version 2 to version 3, these kinds of changes are not “creative,” not radical departures because they merely involve improving what exists. So according to this logic, if we are trying to recognize whether an idea is creative, then expertise in the 0 should help us pick out the 1, right?
In their study, Page Moreau and colleagues noted that experts were using what they knew about the 0 (i.e., film) as their reference point to evaluate the 1 (i.e., digital). Experts were concerned about digital cameras not requiring a darkroom, high-speed film, and specific exposures. To an expert in film, these things were baseline requirements for obtaining a quality photograph. Here is the problem: None of these things is a baseline requirement to obtain a quality photograph when you’re using a digital camera. A novice might not even pick up on this point, but an expert would be acutely aware of the difference.
To an expert, a new product that does not require any of the basic features believed to be critical to product quality might seem questionable and of poor quality. In other words, experts are using the reference points they are expert in to determine whether an idea has features that are creative. Doing this is problematic because creative ideas can be a poor fit to existing paradigms or templates precisely because they are creative (e.g., digital cameras don’t require darkrooms). In contrast, the novices—those who had no experience with film—thought the digital camera was great.
Ironically, knowing a lot about a reference point works wonders when evaluating a familiar idea. If you are an expert mechanic, you would probably know how to evaluate the engine in a 1969 Ford Mustang. You would know exactly what your reference point—a perfectly running 1969 Ford Mustang engine—looks like, sounds like, feels like, and even smells like. And you would know that any deviations from your reference point are things you’ll need to fix.
But when it comes to creative ideas, it is more difficult to know how to interpret the quality of a new idea when it has features that differ so dramatically from our basic reference points. Even experts have little experience using, understanding, or thinking about an idea if it is truly new and different. So when it comes to new ideas, experts know less about how to effectively use reference points than they do when evaluating familiar ideas. Importantly, relative to novices, experts also know more about what they do not know—the unknown unknowns (e.g., what happens to picture quality when you no longer have a darkroom?). This means that when you evaluate something that is new, all your expertise does is help point out that you don’t know anything about it.
This might explain why successful ideas—ideas that experts have vetted and liked—tend to strongly resemble the structure of existing ideas. For instance, the first railway passenger cars were based on the design of the stagecoach (without the horse). And then there’s the caveman in 2001 who discovers how to use a bone as a weapon—one of the most radical innovations in the history of humanity. The caveman can see the link between his current definition of a weapon, his fist, and the new definition, the bone, because he views the bone as a different kind of fist. When people recognize a creative idea, the kind of novelty they are looking for is the kind they are familiar with. One reason for this may be that experts have more uncertainty to cope with when evaluating a new idea than a novice has. So one way to diminish this uncertainty is to see the familiar in the new.
Among Teresa Amabile’s early work is a wonderful paper that explains why experts might devalue creative ideas. She conducted a laboratory study wherein subjects read positive and negative book reviews and then assessed the intelligence of each book review’s author. She found that authors of negative book reviews were rated by participants as being more intelligent than authors of positive book reviews. This means that experts have less to lose and much to gain when being critical of new things, and more to lose when they embrace the new.
In other words, we don’t recognize a 1 just because it is different from a 0. When we recognize creative ideas, we don’t go from 0 to 1 at all. Instead, we go from 0 to a totally different kind of 0 (like the letter O). We recognize creative ideas because they are different from our reference points. But the quality of this difference is key. This difference has to fit our beliefs about what creativity looks like. Differences that are too big don’t fit because they are unfamiliar and maybe even bizarre. Differences that are too small don’t fit because they are boring and trivial. The difference has to be different enough, but also familiar enough for us to categorize it as creative.
Recognizing creative opportunity is all about fit. When something fits our definition, it no longer seems as uncertain and unsafe. This means that the psychological experience of fit influences how we feel. People love the experience of fit. When the world looks just as we expect it will, we feel safe—no reason for fear. Fit with our expectations influences our liking of: color swatches, paintings, and music. In contrast, when the world does not fit our expectations, that means something is wrong.
Feeling the fit gets tricky when we recognize creative ideas. By definition, creative ideas don’t fit perfectly into existing paradigms and templates. For this reason, it is difficult to know if new ideas are useful, reliable, and so forth. So when you evaluate a creative idea, it’s less likely you will feel this psychological experience of fit. This should mean that, on average, people should dislike creativity. But virtually no one in my sample did. When I told Teresa Amabile about this, she asked a pointed question: “Why do people say they love creativity?”
Why are people so quick to admit love and so hesitant to admit hate for creativity? We know that most cultures have extremely positive views of creativity. When children learn about American culture and history in grade school, they are exposed to the image of the rugged pioneer who rebelled, explored, and forged a new world in the Americas. And, in truth, the birth of the United States is a story of gaining the intellectual freedom to think differently. One of the major features of American culture is a strong focus on individualism—the extent to which a person is seen as distinct and unique from others. Hence, if American culture values uniqueness, and uniqueness is a distinguishing feature of creativity, it could be that saying you love creativity is about as socially mandated as saying you love America.
Also, people tend to love their own creative ideas. People describe the process of being creative as enjoyable, interesting, fun, meaningful, and challenging. One company I studied gave its employees a certain percentage of their workweek free to explore their own new ideas. An employee described this policy as “a perk, like taking a vacation in your mind from all the day-to-day monotony.”
Furthermore, there is lots of evidence that when we label something as creative, it means that we like it. Jeff Loewenstein and I found that both Americans and Chinese said creativity made them feel joyous and inspired them with awe. Evidence shows that people who label products as creative want to buy them. When executives label something as creative, there are strong norms to endorse and to select the idea too.
There are clearly strong norms in favor of supporting creativity, but we also know that new ideas have a high failure rate. New ideas are buggy and rarely work perfectly the very first time you try them. We don’t know much about new ideas relative to familiar ones. On average, people don’t like the state of not knowing something. So there are lots of reasons for people to dislike creative ideas too. Because creativity can make us feel really bad, but we want to uphold cultural norms around saying creativity is great, we are in a bind. There are two ways our brains may decide to resolve this problem.
When the world tells us that our hateful feelings are wrong, we want to hide them from view. We can hide them by simply faking it and pretending to like something. We can also hide our negative feelings from ourselves. We can authentically think we love something that our unconscious mind hates. One leader I worked with volunteered to chair a committee to actively promote women in his organization. I believe his desire to increase the number of women in leadership positions was authentic. Oddly, however, when promotion time came, this same leader decided not to promote a highly qualified woman to a leadership role and hired a less-qualified man instead. This indicated to me that while he did have a positive, authentic regard for women, he might also harbor unacknowledged views that women are better suited for home life than work.
In either case, there is strong evidence that our implicit (or unexpressed) beliefs can be very different from our explicit (or expressed) beliefs, in part because there are such strong social norms and rules of appropriate behavior that govern what we tell others we think.
Could the bias against creativity operate similarly to the biases we have against certain groups of people? Just as people can express authentic positive feelings toward a given social group as well as strong negative implicit or unacknowledged feelings toward the same group, could we feel strong positive feelings toward creativity but then end up keeping our negative feelings under wraps—hiding them so as not to violate social norms?
When my colleagues Shimul Melwani and Jack Goncalo and I first searched for the bias against creativity, we were pretty doubtful that we would find it in an undergrad population. We figured that millennials love creativity.
We were right. When we ran the first studies, we found that millennials loved creativity—explicitly (because they told us they did) and implicitly (because their reaction times told us they did). We used a reaction-time test called the IAT—the implicit attitude test—commonly used when studying racial bias. The IAT assesses more automatic responses to word or concept pairings. So the structure of the IAT makes it harder for participants to fake their responses and present themselves in a socially desirable way.
The way we structured the IAT for creativity was to pit words associated with creativity against words associated with practicality. We then asked people to pair these words with words indicating good (e.g., peace, cake, heaven) or bad (e.g., rotten, vomit, hell). Faster reaction times pairing creativity-related terms with words like peace and cake and slower reaction times pairing creativity-related terms with words like rotten and vomit indicated a more implicit love of creativity.
But not all students were in love with creativity. When we examined mean ratings of explicit and implicit bias by undergraduate major, we found that engineering students explicitly said they loved creativity. But when it came to their implicit ratings, engineering students paired the words related to creativity with words like rotten, hell, and vomit more quickly than with words like peace, cake, and heaven. In fact, they paired words related to practicality more with peace, cake, and heaven. In short, we found our first evidence that people could say they loved creativity but implicitly show negative associations with creativity relative to practicality.
You might then wonder, could students who elect to go into engineering programs have personalities that are less open to experience, and therefore to creative ideas, than students in other majors? A good question, so in our study we asked people to fill out a questionnaire assessing their openness to experience, but statistically controlling for openness to experience did not diminish the extent to which engineering students implicitly hated creativity.
The overall point for our team was that the bias could be changeable or malleable. That is, instead of being something that people had or did not have as a trait, the bias could be something that situations (e.g., someone’s choice of major) could evoke.
The first experiment we ran exposed participants to either a control condition or a risk-taking experimental task. In the control condition group, participants just filled out questionnaires unrelated to the study. In the experimental condition, participants were told to press a button to inflate a balloon on a computer screen. Every time they pressed the space bar, there were two possible outcomes: the balloon might inflate further, giving them a larger cash prize, or the balloon might burst, giving them nothing and ending the task. After they engaged in this exercise, we told the experimental group that, regardless of their performance, we would randomly assign one person in the study to receive a cash prize. Both groups—control and experimental—were then prompted to complete the explicit and implicit attitude tests.
Everyone in the sample, regardless of condition, explicitly said they loved creativity. That is, when we asked participants, “Do you value creativity?” they said, “Yes.” But when we looked at the reaction-time test, it told a different story. In the control condition group, everyone associated creativity with peace, cake, and heaven. In the experimental condition group, where people felt uncertain, they associated creativity with rotten, vomit, and hell. Just as people can express positive regard for others in a certain social group while also harboring strong negative implicit feelings toward those same people, we showed that participants had strong positive expressed regard for creativity even though reaction-time tests showed that they associated creativity with words like rotten, vomit, and hell.
We also wanted to show how people’s implicit bias against creativity would shift how they assess creative ideas. In a second experiment, we directly manipulated tolerance for uncertainty. We randomly assigned participants to one of two condition groups and prompted them to write about one of two statements: For every problem there is only one correct solution (this is the uncertainty intolerance prime—the first manifestation of the how/best mindset), or For every problem there is more than one correct solution (this is the uncertainty tolerance prime—the first manifestation of the why/potential mindset). We subsequently had participants take the creativity-practicality IAT and also rate an idea (i.e., a running shoe with nanotech that adjusts fabric thickness to reduce blisters) we had pre-tested that showed extremely high levels of creativity.
People primed with the how/best mindset explicitly told us they loved creativity but they implicitly associated creativity with words like vomit and downgraded the creative idea. People primed with the why/potential mindset also told us they loved creativity, but they associated creativity with cake and rated the creative idea highly.
Taken together, what we found is not just that people dislike novelty, which is what prior work had shown. Instead, we identified that people worshiped creativity—implicitly and explicitly—except when they felt uncertain. When they felt an intolerance toward uncertainty, they still weren’t ready to openly admit that they disliked creativity, but their reaction times showed that they harbored automatic and potentially unconscious negative associations with it that led them to downgrade a creative idea. We get in this bind when we use a how/best way of viewing the world.
What does this mean for you? You, your boss, or your coworkers can say you love creativity, but at the same time, you may also hate it. Our negative feelings about creativity are tricky because we don’t admit them. Instead, our negative feelings might be more automatic and even unconscious. In other words, you may not be aware that you harbor negative feelings for creativity.
Chances are, if you’re reading this book, you’ve developed a creative idea. And, chances are, given peoples’ propensity to feel uncertain about creative ideas, your idea was rejected at least once. If that rejection hurt a lot, it was probably because the rejection came from a person with gatekeeping or decision-making power. We care very much whether gatekeepers embrace our creative ideas. Our ideas have a chance of making an impact in our organizations only if decision makers say yes to them. When gatekeepers say yes, it allows more and more people to see, use, and evaluate our ideas. When gatekeepers say no, we either have to find another gatekeeper or our creative ideas go into the file drawer, never to be seen again.
Organizations employ gatekeepers to coordinate how resources are allocated toward idea development and implementation. Many organizations have steering committees that govern which ideas are funded and which are not. For example, book publishers have acquisition committees that decide which book proposals are accepted for publication and which are not.
Most organizations employ gatekeeping roles to govern how they innovate. Product development companies, for example, might have layers upon layers of gatekeepers. In one company I worked with, to get an idea through, an employee has to pitch the idea to her manager. If the manager says yes, then the employee has to pitch the idea to the steering committee of higher-level managers. If that steering committee also says yes, then she has to pitch the idea to the regulatory folks (e.g., the legal department). If the regulatory department says yes, then she has approval to make a prototype. After the prototype is made, the whole chain of decision making starts all over again to get approval to mass-produce the product.
As you can see from this example, decision-maker roles are the key to ensuring that our ideas don’t die an early death. But what if decision-making roles themselves were the problem? Could the very existence of the gatekeeper/decision-maker role kill creative-idea recognition? Regardless of what people know, what if adopting a decision-making role caused people to adopt a how/best mindset and to devalue creative ideas?
Shimul Melwani, Jeff Loewenstein, Jennifer Deal, and I wanted to know the answer to this question. We recruited undergraduate business majors and invited them into the laboratory. We showed participants a video of a professor describing trying out a new idea for a pitch-contest format by and for the students. We randomly assigned one group of participants to a decision-maker role and the second group to a control condition where they merely evaluated an idea.
For the decision-maker role, students were told that they were responsible for whether ideas were pushed to the next level, and they would be accountable for their evaluations being of good quality and how resources would be spent. For the control condition, we told students that their ratings, in aggregate, would determine whether an idea was pushed forward.
We then had all participants—regardless of condition group—rate an idea. The idea we used was pretty fun—it was dirty-diaper roofing, in which roofing materials are made out of dirty diapers through a process of thoroughly sanitizing and then manufacturing them into pellet form instead of disposing of them in a landfill. We showed everyone the same description of the idea, with one small exception—we included what some people might call business viability data, or even vanity metrics. Vanity metrics indicate the number of people in a crowd who endorse an idea (e.g., registered users, raw page views, number of downloads). One half of participants were told that the diaper-roofing idea received 22,000 Facebook likes and 178 percent of all requested funding from Kickstarter after a thirty-day campaign. The other group was told that the idea received just 22 percent of funding requested from Kickstarter investors after a thirty-day campaign, and only thirty-one Facebook likes.
What did we find?
First, decision makers had more of a how/best mindset than those in the control group. Further, decision makers, with their how/best mindset, thought dirty-diaper roofing was super-creative when it garnered lots of Facebook likes and Kickstarter investors, but not very creative when it didn’t. Those in the control group, however, rated dirty-diaper roofing as super-creative, regardless of Facebook likes or investor funding. The funny thing was that decision makers didn’t see the idea with lots of Facebook likes and investor funding as more useful than the idea with fewer likes and less funding, just more creative. And we replicated this finding using a different idea in a large Fortune 500 company in a sample that included CEOs.
By definition, creative ideas look different than familiar ideas proven by established paradigms. Creative ideas often don’t have big market share, lots of investor interest, or Facebook likes—yet. There are many reasons for this. First, creative ideas are sometimes too early-stage and need some development or tweaks to appeal to consumers. Second, the ideas might not have found the right audience yet. And, as I’ll discuss in Chapter 5, developers may have a terrific product but haven’t yet learned how to pitch it properly to consumers.
The field used to believe that because creative ideas are often too new to have gained acceptance, it puts decision makers in a bind. Decision makers can choose a creative idea and risk their reputations should the idea fail, or they can choose a familiar, less-risky idea that might not solve the problem as well.
Except that we found that decision makers aren’t really in a bind at all. They don’t even see ideas with low social acceptance or poor vanity metrics as being creative in the first place. They only see the creative opportunity when ideas are highly accepted.
You might think this is reasonable. If ideas are highly accepted, aren’t they going to succeed? Well, we know that Kickstarter investors can sometimes invest in an idea not because it’s great, but because the idea has a great investor incentive structure (e.g., if you invest X amount, you get a cool T-shirt). And further, for a small fee you can buy Facebook likes—so these kinds of metrics are extremely easy to game and fake—one reason they are called vanity metrics. So even though these kinds of metrics are often unrelated to whether products are ultimately profitable, to a decision maker, they mean the products are creative. And these kinds of metrics have a second utility to decision makers. If a metric is great, then a decision maker can use that metric to justify why he made a decision to invest even though the idea later failed.
What do our findings mean overall? They mean that telling decision makers in your organization to embrace creativity is simply not enough. You can’t overcome the bias against creativity by just saying, “Hey, choose creative ideas!” This is because people with a how/best view will shift their definition of creativity to suit their desire to reduce uncertainty and protect their own reputations.
This finding also means that decision-making roles can evoke a real bias against creativity. In most decision-making contexts, ideas with the highest scores advance to the next round. So in our experiment with business school undergrads, the mere fact that the diaper idea had fewer Facebook likes would have meant that it would not have advanced to the final round if the decision makers were in charge. But this same idea would have advanced to the final round if the evaluators—who did not have decision-making responsibility—were in charge. In other words, randomly assigning a student to a decision-maker role caused that student to devalue an idea that as an average person she would probably have loved.
We wanted to know the micro-mechanisms at work here. Why were decision makers devaluing an idea with low investor funding? It wasn’t because they thought the idea was less useful, so what was it? Turns out, the answer is anxiety! When we primed people with a how/best mindset and they evaluated ideas with low investor funding, they felt more anxious about having to defend their evaluations to others. Those who didn’t have a how/best mindset weren’t anxious about defending their judgments of ideas with low investor funding at all.
Remember what I said earlier about experts having more to lose and less to gain by endorsing a creative idea? Well, the same could be true of people with no relevant expertise who are assigned to decision-maker roles.
So putting all the pieces together, we can see that experts often know things that make it harder for them to feel the fit. Experts may reject your great ideas because what they know about their reference points can make them more aware of what they don’t know. But expertise—or what people know—is not the whole story. What you know matters, but your mindset also matters. Decision makers can reject your great ideas, too, and not because they aren’t great. Our results show that assigning a decision-making role shifted creativity assessments even for ideas where participants had no expertise. The decision-making role evokes a how/best mindset and, very often, a reaction I call the cover-your-butt response. When decision makers have a how/best mindset, they will see creative opportunity only if the idea allows for them to cover their butts in case it fails. The number-one feature experts use to cover their butts is economic data.
Experts, and also decision makers with little expertise, will tell you, truthfully, that they love creativity. But the feeling of not knowing and the lack of fit occur often enough to make them feel anxiety and even hatred for creativity.
The organizational implications are concerning. If an organization employs decision-making roles to serve as the main gatekeeping function to resource ideas, it will struggle if it needs creativity to survive. Merely placing a person in a decision-making role can shift this person into a how/best mindset. Because people in how/best mindsets think of uncertainty only as a nuisance—they define great ideas as proven to have wide appeal. But new ideas aren’t proven, by definition. Instead, ideas closer to the status quo have reliably proven metrics. For that matter, social approval metrics can be faked (e.g., Facebook likes or downloads bought from India). So even if you mandate that decision-makers select creative ideas, they will choose incremental ideas, or potentially bad ideas with fake social approval data. They will honestly believe both kinds of ideas are more creative than new ideas with relatively poor metrics. And if the ideas they choose fail in the marketplace again and again because creativity is needed, decision makers can use vanity metrics to cover their butts and keep their jobs. This kind of decision-making cycle can go on and on and contribute to an organization’s uncreative destruction.
So what are the warning signs that can signal when we are biased against creativity (as opposed to negative but accurate in our idea assessments)? Unfortunately, there is no research on this topic yet, so I can only offer you my theorizing based on my own experience with the bias. For me, the first creativity bias warning sign is when we experience a strong, negative, knee-jerk reaction to an idea. So, instead of stimulating interest, questions, or curiosity—which are more reasonable responses to things we feel strongly about (positively or negatively)—the new idea immediately stimulates what I call an ick response. An ick response makes us want to move away from the idea and reject it outright instead of making us want to learn more about it.
Recently, a consulting client of mine had an ick response. A division in his company had developed a new way to sell an existing product, which he hated. When I asked him why he felt so strongly about the new idea, he said, “It just makes no sense to me, but I’m not biased against creative ideas—it’s just that the idea is stupid.”
When I probed further to figure out exactly why he didn’t like the idea, he struggled to articulate why and ended up repeating, “It just seems silly and makes no sense.” When he later found out that the department’s idea had tested incredibly positively with audiences, he was bewildered and even more annoyed.
Breaking down his reaction, I would say that my client expressed extreme discomfort around feeling uncertain. He said he didn’t understand the idea, and we know that this feeling of not knowing something is incredibly negative and can be aversive as well. For starters, not knowing something can feel like a threat to an individual’s own identity as being smart or expert. For another thing, not knowing something suggests powerlessness or a lack of control. Not having control or power are states people uniformly hate. So it’s not that the idea itself threatened my client. Instead, it was how the idea made him feel that threatened him.
The other piece of my client’s reaction was to belittle the idea by calling it stupid. This piece could be the most telling creativity-bias warning sign of all because of the expression of contempt. That’s a telltale marker that a person feels threatened. Contempt is a negative emotion that has a fascinating function; contempt conveys a person’s perceived relative superiority to an object or a person.
So when my client called the idea stupid, he was implying that the idea was beneath him. Calling the idea stupid also distanced him from it—making it reasonable for him to ignore it. After all, why would you want to spend your limited time and energy learning about something you thought was beneath your notice?
The end result of a contemptuous remark is to show superiority relative to something—in this case the idea—which, from an internal standpoint, psychologically distances you from the source of the threat and, from an external standpoint, manages people’s impressions of you as being “smarter” or “better” than the idea you are criticizing.
Shimul Melwani and I, along with Jen Overbeck at Melbourne University, published a paper showing that making a contemptuous remark toward your teammate made others on your team think you were smarter and more leaderlike, even when controlling for actual ability. We replicated this finding twice with undergrad and MBA student teams at two different business schools. This is why contempt is such a powerful marker of bias, because it provides a reason why a person can reject an idea with little thought or care, and it makes other people observing the reaction think that person is actually smart.
Of course, the irony is that the person rejecting the idea does not actually reject it because he is smart. Rather, he rejects the idea because he does not understand how to evaluate it. What he is really rejecting is the annoying sense of uncertainty that comes with an idea he doesn’t understand. Learning how to distinguish between these two concepts—rejecting ideas versus rejecting the ways new ideas make us feel—is key to overcoming one’s bias.
So what I have seen in others, and even felt myself, when experiencing this bias against creativity is a strong negative emotional reaction that compels people to immediately belittle the idea and then to shy away from it. When we feel this bias, our ick response keeps us from exploring the idea, from asking questions about and learning why we don’t like it, and from learning what we might improve to make the idea better.
This means that we are more likely to reject creative ideas quickly and without much real thought, and that when we do reject creative ideas, we usually do so simply because we don’t understand them and want to get away from that feeling of not knowing, because it makes us feel uncertain and unsafe. This also means that we might not reject creative ideas as readily when we think deeply about them first or have a dialogue with others who think differently than we do about them.
The first step toward combatting this bias against creativity is to become more aware of when we exhibit the bias warning signs. The second step is to learn how to transform these biased feelings into something that allows us to embrace the creative solutions that may ultimately enrich our lives.
To sum up, when you feel uncertain, find yourself intolerant to uncertainty, or are steeped in a how/best mindset, you may have knee-jerk reactions to reject the very solutions that could make your life better. Furthermore, other people are likely to feel the same way you do and to reject ideas they badly need when they are entrenched in a how/best way of seeing the world.
All this is important because if we are aware of the maladaptive way we have been managing our feelings about creative ideas, we can then regain some control over our ability to adopt creative change and learn to better cope with it. Once we recognize the implicit warning signs of resistance to new ideas, we can begin to develop strategies to overcome this negative response and turn it into something much more constructive.