The best managers find ways to motivate their teams to push and persist until a tough goal is achieved. According to new research from the Kellogg School, the best ideas are likely to come later in the process. If you stop prematurely, you could miss a big insight.
“People just give up too easily,” says Loran Nordgren, an associate professor of management and organizations. “They’re robbing themselves of their more interesting ideas by giving up too soon.”
Nordgren’s team found that people often underestimate how many new ideas they can generate if they persevere. This probably arises from feeling like the creative task is hard — and its success uncertain. Anecdotes and research alike suggest that persistence is key to creative success. But it is not clear whether people understand the power of persistence in creative work.
In one experiment, the researchers found that the more difficult a creative task felt, the more people underestimated the number of ideas they could produce while persisting. Also, study participants who were asked to work on more creative tasks undervalued the power of persistence when compared to participants who were asked to perform more straightforward tasks. Why? The researchers theorize that because creative work is nonlinear, it is not clear how close you are to a good solution and whether more effort will yield more ideas.
The practical, take-home message is that if you reach a point in a creative task where you feel stuck, ignore that instinct — at least for a while. “That feeling that you’ve kind of run out of ideas is inaccurate and, in a sense, shouldn’t be listened to,” Nordgren says.
