Discerning creativity: a group process perspective on idea selection

ABSTRACT

Groups struggle to identify creative ideas, often gravitating towards more mediocre ideas even when better ideas (i.e., ideas that are more novel and useful) are available for selection. While this issue has been well-documented, how to overcome the problem is not yet well-understood. In this essay, we advocate for the utility of using structured processes to aid groups in selecting more creative ideas and offer one example of such a structured process that practitioners can use to improve the odds of groups finding those ‘diamonds-in-the-rough’. The process is theoretically grounded and designed to overcome the very obstacles that have been suggested by previous research to impede the selection of creative ideas in groups. Our six-step process is easily implementable and applicable in a variety of contexts in which selection bodies have to make decisions under uncertainty.

KEYWORDS:

• Groups
• creativity
• selection
• process

Acknowledgments

We thank Brendon M. Cummiskey for contributing to the development of some of the ideas in this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14479338.2024.2334212.

Notes

1. The use of a deliberate, structured process to idea selection is an effective means to reduce the process losses often accompanying group work. However, a non-deliberate, intuitive approach to idea selection has been found to be effective at the individual level (see Zhu et al., 2017).