Improve Creative Brainstorming With Constructive Criticism
The conventional wisdom is that criticizing others’ ideas during a brainstorming session will stifle participants’ creativity. But new research shows that context — cooperative versus competitive — is key, and forcing participants to suspend judgment about the quality of ideas during brainstorming could in fact stifle free thinking and expression. The author describes the types of scenarios in which encouraging criticism can yield not just more ideas, but more creative ones.