Welcome back to the fourth and final video on creativity. My name is Daan Stam and today we're going to talk about how groups can be creative. This is very important, because groups, as we will see, even groups of highly creative individuals can miserably fail to generate any creative output. Let's see why. Please look at the two pictures on the slide and ask yourself, which of these two groups would be best at generating a lot of high quality ideas? Is it the group on the left where people are interacting together and are chatting while working and sharing ideas? Or is it the right hand group in which people are in their cubicles, working individually and just come up with ideas on their own? Which of these two groups are better at idea generation? Actually, although 80% of the people would answer the left hand group, a lot of research shows that the group that is the best at idea generation is the right hand group. The group where people do not share ideas, do not talk together, and that in some sense is not a group at all. How is this possible? What are the processes behind this finding? That is what we are going to talk about in this video. Imagine the following situation, four people are brainstorming together. They are all thinking about a new product for instance, a new car. Moreover, they're generating ideas from different domains related to cars. For example, the first person is looking at the chassis of the car. The second thinks about the engine. The third person thinks about the design. And another person thinks about the steering. The fact that these four people think about different domains is a really good thing. They potentially can think of many different ideas and integrate these ideas after the brainstorm. Now, in a perfect world, this is what may happen during a brainstorm. One person within the group shares his ideas concerning the steering. Now, what you hope to occur is that one person identifies links between his or her ideas, for example, about the chassis and a shared idea about steering. Another person may be inspired by this shared idea about steering and suddenly thinks of really great ideas about the design of the car. And yet another person maybe stimulated by the sharing in general and tries to put more effort into finding ideas for him or herself concerning the engine. In other words, sharing ideas can lead to inspiration and synergy. This is, of course, a good thing and would mean that interacting groups are actually really good at brainstorming. Unfortunately, the opposite happens more often. This is due two important reasons production blocking and evaluation apprehension. Let's investigate both. First, let us discuss production blocking. Here you see the same group of people again and these people are still developing a new car and think of different domains. Chassis, engine, design, and steering. What happens when a team member shares his or her idea, for instance, on the steering of the car? Person A was generating ideas about the chassis. But, he gets interrupted by Person D who shares his or her idea on the steering. The consequence is that Person A starts thinking about the steering of the car instead of of the chassis. And eventually, everybody is looking to steering and we may miss a lot of good ideas concerning chassis, engine, or design. More importantly, Persons B and C, who are actually listening to Person D sharing his or her idea, are not searching any more for new ideas at all. Since it is very difficult to listen to other people and, at the same time, think about your own ideas. This is very likely to happen. Research on this process, which is called production blocking, shows this process is very harmful. It diminishes the amount of ideas as well as the quality of those ideas that a group generates. It is one of the most prominent reason why teams are actually not so successful in generating new ideas. Now, let's discuss evaluation apprehension. Please think about the same team again, brainstorming about a new car. Again, Person D shares an idea from his or her own domain, the steering of the car. Now, Person C was thinking about the design and wanted to share a radical but risky idea. Person C now thinks maybe, my idea is not as good as the idea about the steering. Maybe we should just focus on steering and not on design. He or she then only shares ideas that fit what is already there. In other words, this person is afraid to share his or her ideas because he or she fears to be negatively evaluated. This is really harmful for creativity. Especially because the ideas that are not mentioned are often the most unique. This process is called evaluation apprehension. The idea that we do not want to be negatively evaluated. And that we might be if we come up with a weird idea. The consequences of evaluation apprehension are very dire. Because, if unique ideas are not shared, we only get similar ideas in a group. This is problematic because we want a lot of different ideas. So, we can combine the best ones. Because of production blocking, the inability to generate ideas and listen or speak at the same time, and evaluation apprehension, the fear of being negatively evaluated for sharing a weird idea, even teams of highly creative people may not live up to their potential in terms of creativity. What can we do to overcome production blocking and evaluation apprehension? The nominal group technique. The nominal group technique consists of five stages. First, a facilitator welcomes everyone and details the task. Then, instead of sharing ideas immediately, the first thing that people have to do is generate ideas on their own and in silence. Only after generating ideas on the their own and in silence can people share their ideas between them. And after sharing ideas, they discuss them. And make sure everyone understands them. Finally, the ideas are all ranked to see which ones will be used. Now, the nominal group technique has been widely researched. And that has been shown that this technique really helps things to be much more effective in idea generation. It leads to more ideas as well as better ideas. Importantly, the key element here is the silent generation of ideas. When we are thinking of ideas silently, we won't have the problem of production blocking. Simply because we can't be interrupted. Moreover, we won't have the problem of evaluation apprehension either. Because we don't know what other people are thinking of. Logically, we can not compare our ideas too. So, we can only think of our own ideas and write them down. Now, at the Rotterdam School of Management, we have investigated this silent idea generation, which we called suspending debate. And we showed that with a phase of silence of only five minutes, we did an idea generation, the number of ideas already improves enormously. And interestingly, so does the diversity of ideas. And the quality of solutions. Simply generating ideas on your own, at being silent for about 5 to 10 minutes, can really benefit your brainstorm. By enclosing a moment of silence you avoid production blocking and evaluation apprehension. My suggestion, never again brainstorm without suspending the group debate for at least five minutes. So, what have we learned about creativity this week? We discussed what creativity is and why it is important to companies. We investigated what makes some people more creative than others. And we used this knowledge to also understand how to make other people or ourselves more creative. And finally, we saw how optimize the creative output of groups of people. Now, of course, there's much more to say about creativity. But, with this knowledge at hand, the fuzzy front end of innovation will be much less difficult and daunting. Thank you very much for joining us and until next week.
