Why Teams Pick the Wrong Ideas — and What Leaders Can Do About It | Dr. Roni Reiter-Palmon

45% of teams select a suboptimal solution — even when a better one is right in front of them. Creativity researcher Dr. Roni Reiter-Palmon explains why, and what leaders can do to fix it.

Most teams jump straight to solutions. It feels productive. It looks like progress. But according to Dr. Roni Reiter-Palmon, that instinct is costing organisations their best ideas — before they ever get off the whiteboard.

Roni is the John Lewis Holland Distinguished Professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Director of Innovation for the Centre of Collaboration Science, and President of Division 10 of the American Psychological Association. Ranked in the top 2% of researchers globally, she has authored over 200 publications and is co-editor of the forthcoming APA Handbook of Creativity.

In this conversation, we explore the full arc of creative problem solving — from defining the problem to selecting the solution — and why rushing any part of the process leads teams to consistently underperform.

What we cover:

The 53% finding — In videotaped team sessions, over half of all communication was devoted to defining the problem, not solving it. Far from wasted time, this investment was the single biggest driver of better outcomes.

The 45% problem — Nearly half of teams in Roni's research selected a suboptimal solution from their own generated ideas. They did not recognise an effective idea even when they had produced it themselves. More structure and guidance reduced this to 25% — still a sobering number.

Why AI produces mediocrity — AI compresses the distribution of ideas toward the average. The truly terrible ideas disappear, but so do the genuinely breakthrough ones. If you are relying on AI for creative thinking, you may be trading originality for the illusion of productivity.

The hidden cost of brainstorming — The brainstorming movement did creativity a disservice by equating one phase of the process with the whole. Problem construction and idea evaluation — the phases before and after — are where most teams lose the most value.

Psychological safety as the foundation — Every component of effective creative problem solving, from information sharing to constructive conflict, depends on psychological safety. Without it, none of the other techniques take hold.

What leaders can actually do — Practical guidance on managing the messy middle of collaboration: how to keep multiple perspectives alive, how to prevent task conflict tipping into relationship conflict, and how to know when creativity is genuinely needed and when it is not.

"The notion of brainstorming did a disservice to the field because it equated brainstorming with creativity, when in fact it's only one aspect of the creative process." — Dr. Roni Reiter-Palmon

Connect with Roni: University of Nebraska at Omaha: unomaha.edu Email: rreiter-palmon@unomaha.edu LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roni-reiter-palmon-222ba46/

Referenced episodes: Zorana Ivcevic Pringle — Problem framing and emotional creativity Vlad Gl

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Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Roni Reiter-Palmon 0:47

And we found that 45% of the teams selected suboptimal solutions, which scared me very much, right?

Why Problem Framing Matters

Mark Blackwell 0:59

Welcome back to Arkaro Insights. I'm your host, Mark Blackwell. Today we are joined by a true pillar in the creativity research community, Dr. Roni Reiter Palman. Roni is the John Lewis Holland Distinguished Professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the Director of Innovation for the Center of Collaboration Science. She currently serves as the president of Division 10 of the American Psychological Association, the Global Hub for the Study of Creativity in the Arts. Ranked in top 2% of social psychology researchers, only has authored over 200 publications, including the Handbook of Organizational Creativity, and is currently shaping the field as co-editor of the forthcoming APA Handbook of Creativity. In one of our recent episodes with Zarana Ifcevic Pringle, we touched on a finding that changed how I look at meetings. That the most creative teams spend a significant amount of time framing a problem before they ever touch a solution. Roni is a pioneer behind this research on problem construction. So today we're going to discuss why teams struggle to pick the best ideas, often leaving the most innovative solutions on the cutting room floor, and how leaders can manage the messy middle of collaboration without closing down the process too early. I'm really looking forward to this discussion, Roni. Thank you for coming.

Roni Reiter-Palmon 2:37

Thank you for having me. Excited to be able to talk about these topics.

Mark Blackwell 2:41

Oh, great. Well, I was remember when we're chatting with Zarana, she confirmed one of my fears, which is Einstein never said if I had an IR to solve the problem, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem. Because it's a meme I've used uh much in my consulting world. But maybe, maybe she did say that there is some science out there and pointed me in your direction because I wanted to discuss the work that you'd done on this. Um she talked about one particular paper, which is a study about 50 feet percent. And again, it's just one paper, or maybe you can tell me more. But how did you come across this finding?

Inside The Lab: How Teams Think

Roni Reiter-Palmon 3:25

So basically, what we've done is is something that required a huge amount of time. So we collected data from student teams. This was done in the laboratory, uh, where students signed up for the study, came into the laboratory, and we gave them uh a problem to solve. So the first time-consuming effort is making sure that three students come into the lab at the same time. For the academics in the room, they know if you have three people signed up, one or two will show up, the third will not, and now you don't have a team, all right? So data collection took a while. The other thing that we did was videotape them as they engaged in the process of solving the problem. Now, the cool thing about looking at teams in the creative problem solving effort is that they actually have to verbalize what they're doing. So when we look at individuals, there's all kinds of stuff happening in their heads that we are not aware of because they're just thinking about it. For the team, if it doesn't get said, it's not part of that team vocabulary. It's not part of the process. It doesn't mean that individuals can't think of stuff that they don't share. It's just that when we look at the team process, we can only think about look at what they verbalize and talk about. We then developed a new system of evaluating the communication between team members that reflected the different processes of the creative problem solving. We condensed it to basically the problem finding, problem construction process, idea generation, and idea evaluation. And then the specific finding that you mentioned, we look at the proportion of time they spent across each of the three pieces. Now, they could start with problem construction, move to idea generation, go back to problem construction. So we didn't look at it as sort of it happens only once, but rather how much of the time overall did they spend defining the problem, whether it was initially or going back to the drawing board after their idea, they looked at their ideas and went, no, no, we don't like what we have. And then once we did it that way, we found that over 50% of the time, they actually did discuss what does this problem mean? How can we conceptualize it? How do we need to think about it? Uh, and we were not expecting that finding, to be honest, because at the individual level, what we find is that people do this very automatically. I think part of the reason they engaged in so much of that process was because they did not know each other very well. They were students that just signed up. So I'm not sure this would translate to the same extent to teams that are working together for a long time. But we have evidence from other data from other research that when a new team member comes in, they sort of upset the apple cart by asking questions and trying to understand what the problem is. So I expect it would be a lot lower for teams that know each other well, but as soon as a new member comes in, it's gonna ramp up again.

Mark Blackwell 7:08

And so what is the productive thing that's happening if you slow down and give people time to think about the problem? Is it just the generation of a common mental model or are there other things going on?

Shared Mental Models And Conflict

Roni Reiter-Palmon 7:21

I think there are multiple things happening. We do know. So let me talk about what we know from the individual level because I think it transfers to teams, and then there's the unique aspect of teams. So at the individual level, we know that when people think about the problem carefully and what it means and take into account different ways of thinking about the problem and different perspectives, they come up with a much more coherent and complex understanding of the problem. When you have a team and you have team members that think about the problem differently, of course, that also happens as well. You also mentioned the shared mental model, and I think that's a big part of what is happening in teams. It allows the team members to understand the perspectives of each other and how they're thinking about the problem. What we see sometimes, uh particularly, I'm I'm sure you've encountered this in your practice, where you have a conversation in a team and they start fighting over what the right solution is when in fact they have different conceptualizations of what the problem is. It's not that one solution is better than the other or right or wrong. It's that what are you trying to solve for? And they're trying to solve for different things. And if they can come to common understanding up front, that conflict gets resolved. In a different study that we did, we found that teams that were instructed to discuss and conceptualize the problem before they actually solved it, were more satisfied with the process itself of the creative problem solving as a whole, um, and reported reduced conflict. What was really funny on that one, or or not funny, but interesting, was that the level of conflict was low across the board, regardless of whether they discussed the problem or not. But even with that, what we call floor effect, we were able we were able to find a significant statistical difference. So teams that actually discussed the problem beforehand and sort of reached an understanding between themselves about what the problem was and what they're trying to solve for reported even less conflict.

Mark Blackwell 9:56

It's almost counterintuitive because you would someone in the team to say, oh, this is obvious, we know what the problem is, and be frustrated that people actually even wanted to engage in a definition of the problem. Yet it seems to require satisfaction from that. That's uh interesting finding.

Roni Reiter-Palmon 10:12

Yeah. And again, to me, that meant that what we typically tend to think about those social processes in the team as separate from the cognitive processes, but in fact, they're intertwined.

Mark Blackwell 10:26

So if you're a facilitator or a leader with a team, what can you do to maintain energy and go at the right pace and know when you've reached the end of this problem understanding phase?

Leading The Framing Phase

Roni Reiter-Palmon 10:40

That's a great question. I think a few things come to mind. We actually don't have research on when people actually stop, but I think in terms of what leaders can do is first of all ensure that the team engages in the process, right? So let's not jump straight to solutions. It's so easy. Because we want to solve the problem and we want to reach that closure of we did something. And sitting and thinking about the problem doesn't feel like we did something. So a leader needs to make sure that we think about the problem. The other thing the leader can do is make sure that particularly with complex problems, which are those problems that allow for creative thinking, there are multiple perspectives that need to be taken into account. There are multiple ways of thinking about the problem. So ensuring that those different ways of thinking about the problem and those different perspectives are covered. So if we see people repeating the same thing over and over again, or certain people are not being conveying their opinions, leaders can ensure that by asking the right questions of, you know, so what do you think about this? What is your perspective, or have we thought about this from the perspective of, you know, this division or this department or the consumer or the supplier, again, depending on what the problem is. So it's a great way to ensure that all the voices are heard. The difficult part is translating those different perspectives to a coherent whole and integrating them. And again, we have findings from the literature that that integration, taking into account those multiple perspectives, it's not enough just to list them. If you list them just to list them and then you ignore them, in fact, what we find is that those teams perform worst.

Mark Blackwell 12:52

Wow. Yeah.

Constraints, Effectiveness, And Quality

Roni Reiter-Palmon 12:53

If you integrate them, that's when that synergy that we talk about comes to life.

Mark Blackwell 13:02

It's a little bit like a conversation I had on constraints. The more constraints, the more factors that you dig in, you're going to get a better solution. And it sounds like if you're defining the problem with more components, then that's going to lead to richer solutions. Absolutely.

Roni Reiter-Palmon 13:20

Yeah. Yeah. And also what we're finding is that sometimes, even when you don't require a creative solution, doing this exercise allows you to think about all the different constraints that maybe you didn't think about personally, but somebody else knows exists, all the different perspectives that need to be taken into account and come up with a better solution, a more effective solution. So it may not necessarily be more original, which is the other part of creativity, right? You want it to be original and effective, but it does allow you to come up with more effective solutions because they cover more ground instead of trying something and going, oh, but we didn't think about this and now we encountered a block.

Mark Blackwell 14:06

So this is obviously tension mounting, I can imagine. As people get into the process and there's a lot of energy in the room. What advice do you have for leaders to manage the difference between the conflict and about the task and any relationship task that people might get in the room as energy mounts and enthusiasm mounts?

Task Conflict Versus Relationship Conflict

Roni Reiter-Palmon 14:27

Yeah. Uh that's a hard one, uh, because it has two components, right? So the first one is let's make sure that we talk about what the problem is or what the solution is, as opposed to who the person is. Right. So don't say you don't know anything, because now you're insulting the person and now it moves into relationship conflict. You can voice concerns about how somebody frames the problem or limitations in how they frame the problem, don't make it personal. So on the so one side is how do you provide the feedback or additional information in a way that it will not lead to conflict by making it about the task. But we also have to remember that even if we try to provide what we perceive as constructive criticism, somebody else on the other side might perceive it as a personal attack. And that's a little bit harder to control. But I find that reminding the people in the team that we're here to come up with a better solution and the goal is to make sure this is constructive and not destructive is a good start. I don't know that you can completely control hurt feelings, but do leaders need to do whatever they can to make sure that the conversation is about the task at hand and not the people.

Mark Blackwell 16:03

So it's it's classically make giving you that psychological safety for allowing people to share their opinions. Correct.

Roni Reiter-Palmon 16:11

Yeah, and and really think about psychological safety as sort of an overarching concept if you look at all the components that facilitate creative problem solving, information sharing, effective communication, limited conflict or managing conflict in the right way, and so on. All of that only happens if you have psychological safety.

Mark Blackwell 16:40

And you know, there are many techniques you can do in facilitation. Sometimes if you think it's getting too hot to be productive, maybe just call for timeout and people get some fresh air or even have a meal together or something. That's one thing.

Anonymity, Debiasing, And Facilitation

Roni Reiter-Palmon 16:56

Yeah, I've also used, yeah, I've also used more in facilitation, more anonymized techniques. So instead of people calling other people out or speaking out loud so you know who provided the idea, there are uh computerized tools that allow you to type information in that is completely anonymous. And then instead of asking a person to defend their idea, we pick an idea and pick a person and ask them to defend it, not knowing who provided the idea, right? So it might be the case that it's not your idea and you still have to provide support for it. So there are ways to do that where we remove a little bit of the pressure of who the person is that provided the idea or provided the perspective that allow for more sharing.

Mark Blackwell 17:55

Gotcha. That's that's defending someone else's idea or anonymized other idea is a very interesting approach. It's like in debating arguing for the k the other side that you don't believe in can yield some fascinating creative thought processes when you are argue the opposite. But obviously, we want in a team diversity to get more ideas as as possible. But in a world of limited budgets, that probably means that we have to have some sort of remote processes coming on increasingly.

Roni Reiter-Palmon 18:29

Yep.

Remote Teams And Building Trust

Mark Blackwell 18:30

With people on Teams or Zooms. Now, any tips for that? Because obviously, in the timeout moments or the cocktails afterwards, you're a little bit stuck when someone's waiting, maybe in a different time zone. And it's how do you ensure that that team safety exists for the remote participants?

Roni Reiter-Palmon 18:49

That's a great question. We don't necessarily have great answers yet. I think one of the things that I have seen that is a little frustrating is that when we all went to Zoom or Teams or whatever remote system you're using when we were in lockdown for COVID, we tried to take how we run teams and just in face-to-face situations and just move them to our remote arrangement. And that does not work. It just doesn't because there, as you said, we can't have the meal together, we can't have the cocktail after. One of the things that happens frequently when we have face-to-face team meetings is people trickle into the room, they start conversations with the person they're sitting next to, they start to get to know each other. It's much harder to do, you know, in a Zoom format. If you think about when you came to a Zoom meeting and it's multiple people, everybody there is totally quiet until the actual meeting starts. So you don't have those moments of small talk and getting to know each other. So you have to build them in. So again, we don't have scientific empirical evidence yet of what works. But some things that I've tried to do when I facilitate is beyond the general introductions of everybody in the team, is moving people into smaller groups, into smaller breakout rooms and having them converse a little bit more, then bringing them back together. I've seen people try to do a happy hour, bring your coffee, bring your tea, bring your, you know, beer or wine, depending on your time zone. But we'll take an hour and we'll just sit together and chit-chat, and that's okay. One of the things that we do know, because having remote teams is not new, is that bringing the team together for face-to-face meeting on occasion is helpful in building those relationships. So that's something that, yes, it's a budgetary issue, but it's not a regular thing. You, you know, you do it maybe once when a project starts, bring people in for a couple of days, have them get to know each other, have them share meals, and so on. And then they work remotely, and it seems to facilitate the remote work even more.

The 45 Percent Problem In Selection

Mark Blackwell 21:32

I'd agree absolutely. From experience, that's definitely the case. Uh and we've discussed this, the whole idea from a neuroscience perspective of what sharing a plate does to the brain in trust buildings with Hillary Scarlett. There is science behind it. It's interesting. And it doesn't, it's not just a fun thing. Yeah, I can we uh discussed it with Hillary Scarlett a few podcasts ago, and people do open up and share as one, and we get um the mirror neurons starting to work where we're feeling in sync with other people, and our brains become synchronized and better problem solving by being face to face in a way that cannot exist on the other side of a screen. To the best of our scientific knowledge so far.

Roni Reiter-Palmon 22:15

So Yeah, that's that's good to know. But also we see it in every culture, right? The notion of breaking bread exists in every culture. Uh it and therefore, to me, at least in at that point, I was like, okay, this must be significant.

Mark Blackwell 22:30

Yes. Definitely. Well, we've got about you know the process of understanding the problem, and we've discussed about creating the problem and some techniques that we could can do. One of the things that really surprised me when I was preparing. For this podcast is your work that shows just how bad teams are at selecting solutions that they've made. Can you recount this work, this finding that you've come across?

Why Teams Misjudge Good Ideas

Roni Reiter-Palmon 22:58

Um, so um the early work basically we just asked teams to choose. We had them generate ideas and then we asked them to choose the idea they thought was best. We didn't define what we meant by that necessarily. We then evaluated the ideas for the two components of creativity, effectiveness and originality. And we basically said, okay, if they choose a creative response, one that was highly original and highly creative, or at least moderately original and moderately, moderately original and moderately effective. So on a five-point scale, three and up on each component, that was a considered a creative solution. If it was just effective, not original, but it was a good solution. Three and up on that scale, those were considered good choices. Anything else, meaning that it was low on basically low on effectiveness, was considered a suboptimal solution. And we found that 45% of the teams selected suboptimal solutions, which scared me very much, right? Because if you think about it, if 45% of the teams can't even recognize a create they can't recognize creative solutions, they many times teams and individuals choose not to implement creative solutions for a variety of reasons, not just rightly because they can't recognize them, but also partly that, you know, people are afraid uh of creative ideas. We don't know how they will work out, right? They're new, they're novel, we have no idea if they'll work out, so I'm not gonna choose it. But they didn't even recognize the good solutions, the effective solutions. And that's kind of scary. In a second follow-up study, we tried to provide them with systems that would allow for better discussion and understanding of what makes a good solution. So we defined what an effective solution was, we defined what an original solution was, we asked them to discuss, we asked them to, in one condition, we asked them to select a smaller subset of ideas that they thought would work and only evaluate those more thoroughly so they had a smaller pool to look at sometimes, and and we found that those systems, providing them with more guidance and structure, reduced the number of teams that selected poor solutions to 25%. But we still had a quarter of the teams that chose solutions that were not effective and not creative.

Mark Blackwell 26:04

So if I can just come from a different angle. So typically in workshops in the business world, the standard approach is a two by two for y-axis impact, x-axis ease of implementation. And there is a bias to get results quickly, so the really the ease gets uh, I would say often too often, the disproportionately high bias. And I wonder if this is related to it. Because ease is related to things that you've done before or no, which is probably a non-novel idea. Is this this related, this this observation and what you're saying about creativity being probably not something novel, and therefore people have got no experience and therefore they think it's harder to implement than it would be?

Add Time, Improve Choices

Roni Reiter-Palmon 26:56

Probably. You know, what I think it it reflects, again, that risk aversion that we have, right? We're not gonna propose a risky idea. Novel ideas are risky by definition because we haven't tried them before. They we might crash and burn. But the part that surprised me was not so much that aversion to the novelty. It was the fact that they couldn't identify effective ideas, right? So, and that's not related to ease. That's related to how they analyzed the ideas that were presented, because no, no, not one team said, Oh, here's a bad idea, we're gonna use it. They themselves thought these were good ideas when in fact our experts said, no, they're not good ideas.

Mark Blackwell 27:46

And what's going on there, do you think?

Roni Reiter-Palmon 27:48

That's a great question, and I'm not sure yet. Something that we we need to investigate, but I think potentially, in some cases, it's actually not taking all perspectives into account. In some cases, it's not looking back at how you define the problem. We actually do have a study where we find that some people we ask them to define the problem, they actually are able to come up with multiple perspectives, but then they ignore all those multiple perspectives and proceed with only one. And those solutions tend to be less creative and less optimal.

Mark Blackwell 28:35

So it's I'm I'm hearing a message, and forgive me wrong, that just as there's fault with speeding the problem definition, there's a little bit of fault with speeding the problems, the solution selection as well, that we might be too fast by forgetting some of the basic key points that we realized behind it. So we just must respect the fact that as humans, you know, this is an investment of time in defining the problem and selecting the right solution that we shouldn't rush.

Roni Reiter-Palmon 29:07

Yep. And honestly, what we're finding, at least with I haven't quantified it on the um idea valuation side, but with the problem construction side, sometimes all you need is five to ten more minutes of re-thinking and rethinking about what the problem is. We're not talking about a huge time investment. This is not hours and hours.

Where AI Helps And Hurts Creativity

Mark Blackwell 29:29

So I obviously at some point in this discussion, I'm gonna have to bring in the idea of AI and where does that fit into the whole process? Because right now, of course, I've got another podcast, which is another person you know very well, Vlad Glavano, who taught me about slow AI. It's beginning the more and more I hear from you about the need to invest time, the more and more it makes sense. And I know I think you wrote a manifesto on the use of AI with Zarana and Vlad, if I'm if I'm not wrong.

Roni Reiter-Palmon 30:02

Absolutely.

Mark Blackwell 30:04

So, where are you coming out in this the role of AI and where it best fits into this whole issue that we discussed about trying to think of a problem, defining the problem, coming up with solutions, selecting solutions. Where is it most effective and where might it be most dangerous?

Prompts, Abduction, And Expertise

Roni Reiter-Palmon 30:24

That's a great question. And I just want to put a caveat that I'm speaking about AI as it exists right now. The changes in AI happen very quickly. It develops very quickly. So, you know, who knows, two months from now or a year from now, my answer will be absolutely irrelevant. When you think about the role of AI and thinking about it from the perspective of the problem construction, idea generation, and idea valuation. I like to think about how does AI work, right? I I think people enjoy the fact that it's it gave me some things I didn't think about, which is great. But in general, AI is designed to be a predictive tool, right? It's it uses the information that I have right now to think about what is the next most likely word that needs to happen, and it the the algorithm works that way. AI is not really thinking. So, how does that influence the process? If you think about the process of problem definition, problem finding, problem construction, a lot of our problem finding happens because we see anomalies. Something is not working the way we expected it, something weird is happening. AI is designed to ignore those anomalies and give you the average. And if that's what it's doing, you're you are not going to find that new problem or that new perspective because AI is not capable of giving it to you. When we think about idea generation, what we're finding with AI is, and here we have actual findings across multiple studies, including one of my own, where the distribution of ideas is much more condensed. So AI doesn't give you the really silly answers that people sometimes give, right? So the really bad ideas are not generated. But we also find that it doesn't give you the really creative, highly creative ideas that people give. It's sort of in the middle. And again, if what we're looking for is mediocrity, that's okay, but usually that's not what we want when we're looking for a creative idea. We're not looking for mediocre, we're looking for something that is truly novel and out there and still effective. So it can help you with idea generation, but it can also, if you rely on it completely, I think it would stifle our creative ideas. And lastly, when we talk about idea valuation, again, what I'm finding is that it provides sort of common notions of strengths and weaknesses, very typical, and not thinking beyond that, which people can do. So I think AI currently is better suited for more routine tasks and less so for creative tasks. So if you need to write an email, and it's a general common response, or if you need to, you know, here's a text of an email, make it sound more friendly, all of that works. The other part about AI is that the questions that we ask AI, the prompts, are really critical. And unfortunately, many people use one prompt, maybe fix it with another prompt. They don't revise their prompts and don't revise them effectively. Um and that gives them more of those mediocre run-of-the-mill answers, which again is not what we're looking for if we're looking for creativity.

Mark Blackwell 35:03

So I as I understand it, because of their predictive nature, AI is very good at inductive thinking and to a degree deductive thinking. But where humans still have the competitive edge is abductive thinking. In other words, see two disconnected events and finding a relationship or hypothesizing a relationship with them, which is that abductive thinking you can do in part of your prompt to find some connections and explore connections that would be impossible with the current status of large language models as predictive machines.

Three Practical Rules For Leaders

Roni Reiter-Palmon 35:37

Right. Yeah. And again, I think part of it is where AI is right now, but also part of it is how we use it. Right. So in order to use AI correctly to help with creative thinking, you need to understand how AI operates. You need to be able to, okay, I'm not going to invest my time in thinking about ideas, but I need to invest my time in writing different and better prompts. And then comes the evaluation. So maybe we're not evaluating specific ideas from other people, but we're evaluating ideas that AI is giving us. And you still need to have knowledge of the domain to understand what AI is doing and know when AI is giving you wrong information. And AI does that. We know it hallucinates, we know it gives you incorrect information at times. If you do not have the expertise, you would not know it.

Mark Blackwell 36:38

You give this false confidence that you think it's researched an article that you've given it as an input, and then the output is just made it up. So I I've seen that so many times. The more I use it, the more I know, have to be cautious of the fact-checking. So thank you very much for that warning, Roni, about where we need to be the limits with AI and not be fooled into thinking it's it's better, and also giving us some comfort that there is great reserves that we have as humans in the whole creative process. We have some space left in the world in the workplace.

Roni Reiter-Palmon 37:14

Absolutely.

Mark Blackwell 37:17

So if you were if we had giving in a business executive some advice with a team as a wrap-up, what would be the three things you would ask them to think about in their next facilitation session? Preparing to get a team together to cope with the creative process.

Closing Insights And Where To Find Roni

Roni Reiter-Palmon 37:35

So the first thing would be thinking about how to create that psychological safety, right? So what are the things that you could do as a facilitator, as a leader, uh to create the psychological safety and maintain it, right? So as a leader, for example, if a team member is, for lack of a better word, misbehaving, calling them on it, showing that this is inappropriate behavior, doing role modeling, showing the appropriate behavior, frankly, being humble yourself, right? So if somebody criticizes your idea, take it. If you want to build that environment where criticism, constructive criticism, is appropriate, you have to be able to take the criticism as well. The second piece is paying attention to the entire process of creative problem solving. I think the notion of brainstorming did a disservice to the field because it equated brainstorming with creativity, when in fact it's only one aspect of the creative process. And then we forgot about what comes before, which is that problem construction, problem definition process, and what comes after, which is the idea valuation and idea selection process, right? So you need to have all aspects. I also think that it's important for facilitators and leaders to know when creativity is needed and when it is not. And I say this as a creativity researcher that thinks that creativity is really, really important. But there are times when the time investment in creative in coming up with a creative solution is just not necessary. Keep that time for when the creative solution is really needed. If you have a solution that works, if you have a solution that is effective, you know it works, and there's no reason to change it. Now, there could be reasons to change effective solutions, but if there's no reason to change it, don't. Go with the effective solution. Leave the time commitment for the times when creativity is needed, and give your team time to go through the process.

Mark Blackwell 40:01

Thank you, Renia. That's the the the cost benefit is a big takeaway for me from this. The benefit is high, but there is a big investment of time if you want to go down that route in order to get a good result, and rushing it is probably not going to be worthwhile. That's the message I've had from you on all phases of this work in the creative process. So thank you for really enforcing that for me. So if people are interested, where can they find out more about you? Where can they contact you?

Roni Reiter-Palmon 40:30

Probably LinkedIn is the best, or my email. You could find me on the University of Nebraska at Omaha website and get my email uh and contact information there. You can find me on LinkedIn and con message me there. I'm also on Twitter, but I don't check it very frequently these days. So less effective. So, but I do check my email compulsively.

Mark Blackwell 40:59

Ronnie, thank you for that. We'll make sure that your email and your LinkedIn and the website for the University of Nebraska is in the show notes for anyone who's interested. Uh, thank you for that. We've had a great conversation of discussions, starting with Vlad and Zarana and Catronelle and now yourself. This is really providing together a really deep understanding of the whole creative process, which I think is so important in an uncertain world, because we do need to find novel solutions for uncertain problem in an uncertain time. And it's been very enlightening to know what the limits of AI are in this process and where we should be investing our time to maximize ourselves. So thank you for a really strong conversation. Really enjoyed it, Ray.

Roni Reiter-Palmon 41:47

Thank you very much for having me.

Mark Blackwell 41:48

Pleasure, great pleasure. Bye bye.

Roni Reiter-Palmon 41:50

Bye.