CFC Blog #259: Falling Off the Creative Cliff!
Rob’s discovery of his own perceived “creative cliff”, and architecture of a bridge to the other side, is inspiring to me. It makes me wonder how many times I’ve hit a "creative false wall", which I mistook as real. Maybe next time I’ll take a few more minutes to tap around, and perhaps discover a hidden passageway to a new set of ideas.
- Corey
FALLING OFF THE CREATIVE CLIFF!
Have you ever lost your keys?
If you’re like me, you walk around telling yourself, “They can’t be there,” (then you look anyway). “They should be here,” (though you’ve looked there four times).
At some point, you say to no one in particular, “I know they’ll be in the last place I look!”
Well duh! Of course they will. Once you find them, why would you keep looking?
So, I attend a TON of Zoom Meetings these days. Just me? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Anyway, last month, I was talking about creative brainstorming with a colleague of mine. We were talking about his team’s struggle with their creative brainstorming meetings. Since the meetings have moved to a virtual format, she said, it’s been increasingly hard to generate quality creative ideas. I could totally relate. Our feeling was that the limitations of virtual meetings and the lack of in-person chemistry seemed like a “new reality”.
Weirdly, I found myself telling her my story about the lost keys and I wondered aloud to both of us (yes, on Zoom the irony isn’t lost on me) if we often think about creative ideas the way we think about keys. We always find our keys in the last place we look – once we find them, we don't need to look further. And in my experience is that in brainstorming meetings we often do the same thing. As soon as we land on anything creative, we go “A ha! We’re done!”. So then we started talking about how maybe doing more, shorter meetings could be the trick. After all, Zoom fatigue is real. Maybe we would generate more ideas that way and simultaneously give people a break.
So – we went and did some research. And ha – wouldn’t you know there’s a term for this. Research calls it the “creative cliff”. Basically what the research says is that people (wrongly) believe their creativity declines during a meeting, coinciding with their mental energy. And that’s why people often settle on their initial ideas – it feels like that’s the best they can do during the meeting.
However, in actuality, the research found that creativity tends to remain constant – or even improve – as an ideation session goes on. And when meeting participants are made aware of this, the creative cliff illusion can be dispelled. The researchers suggest educating participants about the sustainability of creativity, and actuallylengthening the allotted time for creativity sessions, and asking participants for more ideas than you think you need.
Now we also certainly saw the most recent research that energy and attention tend to decay faster in virtual meetings. But, maybe, we wondered – would it be better if we decreased the frequency of those creative meetings – but doubled the length? And in the first one we also tried a quick session on educating the team about why energy declines during Zoom meetings – and that the decline doesn’t lead to less creativity.
I have to tell you it’s been pretty remarkable. The team is happier, we’re having much more fun – and the creativity has been a whole lot better. Yeah, we found that breakthrough ideas aren’t keys. They remain hidden if you settle on the first one you find.