If Your Business Requires Creativity READ THIS

When we formed The Second Science Project four years ago, we were promised by our partners at The Center for Decision Research at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business that science moves slower than life. Which is one of the reasons we are just starting to see the publication of research that was sparked by our collaboration. 

Brian Lucas and Loran Nordgren had their latest research paper, “The Creative Cliff Illusion,” published a few weeks ago in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. Across eight studies - one of which was conducted with Second City students and faculty - the authors tested whether people understood the time course of their own creativity. From the paper:

“We compared people’s beliefs against their actual creative performance. Consistent with prior research, we found that people’s creativity, on aggregate, remained constant or improved across an ideation session. However, people’s beliefs did not match this reality. We consistently found that people expected their creativity to decline over time. We refer to this misprediction as the creative cliff illusion.”

Why is this important?

So much of what we teach at The Second City is how individuals have to unlearn the bad ideas and habits that actually stand in the way of accessing their own creativity. The idea of “yes, and” is to prevent people from saying “no” or “yes, but” in early stage brainstorming; the reason we talk about “making mistakes work for you,” is to provide habits of creative resilience in the face of inevitable and necessary shortcomings; and the reason we speak of improvisation as a “practice” is to acknowledge that it is not a one and done skill. 

What Brian and Loran uncovered was that human beings regularly undermine their own creative process. So it becomes even more essential that we provide our talent - whether it's marketing and sales teams, front line managers or even support services in admin and IT - skills-building in harnessing the most of their own creativity. And that starts by getting them to understand that they need to be aware of a basic human tendency to shut off the valve before all the water has come out. 

Here's a link to the paper: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/07/31/2005620117