I’ve written previously about one of our favorite pieces of research at the d.school, called “The Creative Cliff Illusion,” conducted by Brian Lucas from Cornell and Loran Nordgren from Kellogg.

I hadn’t really considered one implication of the research (tbh, I never finished reading the paper, delighted as I was by the early conclusions!) until reading a fantastic piece in the BBC, namely, that expectations become a self-fulfilling prophecy! If you don’t expect you’ll continue to come up with good ideas, then you won’t!

According to the BBC, “In his final experiment, Lucas investigated the consequences of the creative-cliff illusion. 

He looked into whether the erroneous assumption that participants had exhausted their most creative work led people to abandon brainstorming before they reached their best ideas. (That’s because it was possible that even if people assumed their ideas were declining, they would continue persevering anyway - in which case the creative-cliff illusion would be less relevant to actual workplace behaviours.) 

To test this possibility, Lucas asked the participants to rate a series of statements on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree): 

• People tend to generate their best ideas first

• A person’s best idea is usually among the first few ideas generated

• Ideas generated earlier are often better than ideas generated later

They then took part in a short brainstorming session… As expected, the higher they scored the statements, the less time they spent on the task, and the worse the quality of their ideas. Indeed, each additional point on the scale corresponded to 18% fewer solutions that were deemed to be ‘highly creative’ by the independent judges.”

That’s absolutely astounding! One’s expectation the best ideas come first decreases overall quality of creative output by almost 20%?!? And the more one expects a reduction, the worse the decline?!?

What a fantastic reason to delay decisions and resist cognitive closure.

Related: Don’t Declare Victory Prematurely
Related: Delay Decisions
Related: Resist the Need for Cognitive Closure

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