For better ideas put hope and embarrassment in a blender.

Hope is the first requirement of creativity. Before talent, before training, you gotta believe you can come up with an idea. The psychologist C. R. Snyder defined hope as agency plus pathways (Snyder et al., 1991): the will to pursue a goal, and the ability to generate routes to it, and new routes when one is blocked. In practice, hope means noticing things. It is staying open to the possibility that anything could be relevant. Doubt does the opposite: it narrows your attention to the task you already defined, and you walk straight past the thing that might have solved it. You cannot be creative if you are doubtful, because doubt stops you from seeing the potential in anything.

Richard Wiseman once handed a newspaper to people who called themselves lucky, and to people who called themselves unlucky, and asked them to count the photographs inside (Wiseman, The Luck Factor, 2003). The lucky ones took just seconds. The unlucky ones took about two minutes.

On page two of the newspaper it said in type more than two inches high: "Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper."

The unlucky people missed it because they were too busy counting. The lucky people saw it because they were looking around noticing. That is hope, in practice.

Hope is not just something you either have or you don't. In 2017, researchers at the Weizmann Institute ran an experiment with 90 students (Rozenkrantz et al., PLOS ONE, 2017). Everyone sniffed the same cinnamon-derived odor, cinnamaldehyde. Half were told it was a lab-made scent that increases creativity and lowers inhibitions; the other half were told nothing. The group that believed produced more original ideas on two of three creativity tests. The scent was identical. Only the expectation differed. The hope was built on a false belief (placebo), and it still worked. Believing you will be creative makes you more creative.

The enemy of hope is fear

You cannot be hopeful if you are afraid. Fear does the same thing doubt does: it narrows you. Amy Edmondson's research and Google's Project Aristotle study of 180 teams point the same way (Edmondson, 1999; Google Project Aristotle): teams do their best work when people feel safe looking stupid. Teresa Amabile found that expected evaluation reliably undermines creativity (Amabile, Harvard Business Review, 1998). Put people under a spotlight and they start performing smart instead of thinking freely. Feeling safe is not a nice extra. It is a requirement. No safety, no hope. No hope, no creativity.

Embarrass yourself often

Bad, embarrassing ideas often lead to strong ideas once they have been tossed around a bit. Every breakthrough I have ever been part of started with an idea that was not good enough: half-baked, or wrong for the client, or just plain dumb. And it mattered anyway.

Think of a bad idea as a rung in a ladder. You step on it. A teammate grabs it and climbs a little higher. Someone else sees a different rung, one you would never have reached from the ground. That space between a dumb idea and a breakthrough is the messy middle. It is half-baked drafts and stinging notes, the version that embarrasses you a little, where the idea becomes what it wants to be.

This is not just a nice story. Dean Keith Simonton spent two decades studying scientists and artists and found that the number of hits is proportional to total output, a pattern he called the equal-odds rule (Simonton, Psychological Review, 1997). In a 2015 study of 246 people, Jung and colleagues found fluency, how many ideas you generate, correlated with judged creativity at r = 0.73 (Jung et al., Frontiers in Psychology, 2015). More ideas buys you more chances, and the best ones tend to come late. So embarrass yourself often. Each embarrassing idea is another rung, and another chance.

Ed Catmull, who built Pixar, wrote it down in Creativity, Inc. (Catmull & Wallace, Creativity, Inc., 2014): "early on, all of our movies suck… from suck to not-suck." He called early projects ugly babies. Originality is fragile, and you have to protect it while it is still ugly. Pixar does not start brilliant; it starts messy and trusts the process.

Ideasicle X blends hope and embarrassment

Four experts think independently first, then post their ideas publicly, messy, half-baked, hopeful. A crappy starting idea still affects the rest of the team. It can inspire a completely different idea, or a better version of itself. And, importantly, the online format makes embarrassing yourself cheaper. 

Psychologists call it the "online disinhibition effect" (Suler, 2004): people hold back less when they are typing than when they are talking face to face. Nobody watches you say it out loud. You are at your kitchen table, or on a train, and you just type it. The posts are named, and they stay up. What helps is typing where nobody can see you flinch, with time before anyone replies. Solo thinking, public posting, building, debate, selection. No waiting your turn. Just the rung, and the climb that follows.

Hope and embarrassment, in a blender. Stay open enough to notice the answer on page two, and brave enough to post the idea that embarrasses you a little. Someone may spot the rung you missed.

The answer was on page two of the newspaper all along. The lucky people found it because they were still looking around hopefully, noticing.

So embarrass yourself. Bring your crappy first idea. Post it where your team can see it. And see what happens.

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Sources: Wiseman, The Luck Factor (2003); Rozenkrantz et al., "Placebo can enhance creativity," PLOS ONE (2017); Snyder et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1991); Edmondson, Administrative Science Quarterly (1999); Amabile, Harvard Business Review (1998); Simonton, Psychological Review (1997); Jung et al., Frontiers in Psychology (2015); Catmull & Wallace, Creativity, Inc. (2014); Suler, "The Online Disinhibition Effect," CyberPsychology & Behavior (2004), 7(3), 321-326; Google Project Aristotle.