Creativity doesn’t come easy, but when your team is feeling tapped out, there’s a good chance it’s not.
Loran Nordgren, a professor of management and organizations, and a coauthor conducted experiments to determine what happens when people persist in creative tasks, such as brainstorming new ideas. They found that people often underestimate
how many new ideas they will generate if they keep at it. “People just give up too easily,” says Nordgren. “They’re robbing themselves of their more interesting ideas by giving up too soon.”
Part of the reason we give up is that creativity is not linear. Nordgren suggests stifling the inner voice telling us to throw in the towel. “That feeling that you’ve kind of run out of ideas is inaccurate and, in a sense, shouldn’t be listened to,” he says. “There’s good reason to believe that there are better solutions out there.”
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