Time and creativity, a catch-22 for teams?

What is it about?

The serial-order effect, observed in either all-individual or all-group brainstorming sessions, suggests that originality increases over time. This effect might imply that idea meetings (group brainstorming) need to be lengthy to produce creative ideas. However, given that time is a scarce resource for both organizations and their members, it can be challenging to hold lengthy meetings. To address this issue, we investigated how idea quality changes over time during group brainstorming that follows individual idea generation, a "hybrid" process that more accurately mirrors real-life situations. Our results show a reverse serial-order effect during the subsequent group brainstorming. This implies that meeting for a reasonably brief time and looking into ideas shared early during the meeting may lead to better decisions—if individuals generated ideas prior to the meeting.

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Photo by Headway on Unsplash

Photo by Headway on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Do you love meetings? Meetings frequently play a crucial role in team problem-solving and provide numerous positive social benefits within organizations. However, it's no secret that employees often find themselves busy "fighting fires," and time is a scarce resource for both organizations and their members. Meetings can be quite time-consuming, and maintaining engagement during lengthy sessions can be a challenge. Yet, research since the 1950s has consistently shown that the longer a brainstorming session, the higher the chances of coming up with more creative solutions. This phenomenon, known as the "serial-order effect," is based on the spreading activation over time in long-term memory as more typical idea combinations are thought of and shared before moving on to more unusual ones. This effect is considered one of the most robust findings in modern psychology (Beaty & Silvia, 2012). It makes sense that employees might want to endure lengthy idea meetings in hopes of finding a game-changing solution. (Who can blame them for wanting to extend meetings to spark more creative ideas, especially when a slightly more inventive idea could lead to exponentially greater returns in competitive environments?) So, teams face a catch-22 between time and creativity. However, we found that previous findings were based on experiments that only used either all-individual or all-group brainstorming sessions. Maybe the time-creativity dilemma could be resolved if team members came up with ideas before the meeting. In this individual-then-group (I-G) process, due to impression management and social comparison motives, members would be more likely to share their most promising ideas early in the meeting rather than later. Our study put this hypothesis to the test.

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