Executive Summary
Why do teams generate hundreds of ideas yet consistently fail to select the most innovative ones? Dr Roni Reiter-Palmon, John Lewis Holland Distinguished Professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and ranked in the top 2% of social psychology researchers, has spent decades investigating how creative problem-solving actually works—and why our intuitions about it are so often wrong. Her research reveals that brainstorming, far from being synonymous with creativity, may have done the field a disservice by distracting us from what matters most.
Core insights:
- The 53% finding: the most creative teams spend over half their time framing the problem before generating solutions
- Teams that discuss the problem beforehand report higher satisfaction and reduced conflict—even when baseline conflict was already low
- When teams fight over solutions, they are often conceptualising different problems—alignment on problem definition resolves the conflict
- The 45% problem: nearly half of teams select suboptimal solutions—ideas that are neither creative nor even effective
- Listing multiple perspectives is not enough—teams that fail to integrate them actually perform worse
- Brainstorming did creativity a “disservice” by equating idea generation with the entire creative process, ignoring what comes before and after
- Psychological safety is not a soft skill—it is the foundation upon which creative performance depends
- AI provides mediocre, run-of-the-mill ideas; humans retain the edge in abductive thinking—seeing connections between disconnected concepts
- Know when creativity is genuinely needed: the time investment is substantial, so reserve it for problems that truly require novel solutions
Einstein Never Said It—But the Science Is Real
“We collected data from student teams… we videotaped 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.”
There is a popular meme in the consulting world: Einstein supposedly said that if he had an hour to solve a problem, he would spend 55 minutes defining it and five minutes solving it. Roni confirms what I had feared—Einstein never actually said this. But the science behind it is surprisingly robust.
In one landmark study, Roni and her colleagues did something remarkably labour-intensive. They recruited student teams, brought them into the laboratory, gave them problems to solve, and videotaped the entire process. Anyone who has worked with research participants knows the challenge: if you need three students to arrive simultaneously, one or two will appear and the third will not. Data collection took considerable time.
What makes team research particularly valuable is that teams must verbalise their thinking. When individuals solve problems, all manner of cognitive activity happens silently inside their heads, invisible to researchers. Teams, by contrast, must speak to collaborate. If something is not said aloud, it does not become part of the team’s process.
The researchers developed a coding system to categorise communication across the creative problem-solving stages: problem finding and construction, idea generation, and idea evaluation. Then they measured the proportion of time teams spent on each.
The finding was unexpected. Teams spent over fifty per cent of their time on problem construction—defining what the problem actually meant, exploring how to conceptualise it, considering different ways of thinking about it. This was not a one-time exercise at the start. Teams moved back and forth between problem framing and idea generation, returning to the drawing board when their initial ideas proved unsatisfying.
“We were not expecting that finding to be honest,” Roni admits. “Because at the individual level, what we find is that people do this very automatically.”
The implication is clear. What happens silently and almost unconsciously for individuals must become explicit and deliberate for teams. The investment pays off.
There is an important nuance here. The teams in this study were strangers—students who had just signed up. Roni suspects that established teams who know each other well would spend less time on problem construction. But there is a twist: “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.” Fresh perspectives force the problem framing conversation that familiar teams might skip.
Why Arguing About Solutions Often Means Disagreeing About Problems
“What we see sometimes, particularly, 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.”
The practical payoff of problem construction extends beyond idea quality. In a follow-up study, teams that were instructed to discuss and conceptualise the problem before solving it reported higher satisfaction with the creative process and reduced conflict.
What was particularly striking: conflict levels were low across all teams in the study—what researchers call a floor effect. Even so, the teams that had explicitly discussed the problem reported statistically significant reductions in conflict. When conflict is already minimal, anything that makes it even lower deserves attention.
This might seem counterintuitive. You would expect at least some team members to find problem discussion frustrating—surely it is obvious what we are trying to solve? Yet the research suggests otherwise. Teams appreciate the process, even when (perhaps especially when) it feels unnecessary at first.
The reason connects to shared mental models. When team members think about a problem differently, they generate solutions that address their own conceptualisation, not a shared understanding. The resulting debate looks like disagreement over solutions but is actually disagreement over what the problem is in the first place.
“It’s not that one solution is better than the other or right or wrong,” Roni explains. “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 upfront, that conflict gets resolved.”
This insight has immediate practical application. The next time you observe a team locked in unproductive debate over competing approaches, consider whether they might be solving different problems. Stepping back to align on problem definition may resolve what appears to be an intractable disagreement.
The Social and Cognitive Are Intertwined
“We typically tend to think about those social processes in the team as separate from the cognitive processes, but in fact, they’re intertwined.”
Roni’s research challenges a common assumption in organisational thinking: that social dynamics and cognitive processes are separate domains requiring separate interventions. Build psychological safety over here; improve problem-solving rigour over there.
The evidence suggests these dimensions are far more connected than we realise. The act of discussing a problem before solving it—ostensibly a cognitive exercise—produces social benefits. Team satisfaction increases. Conflict decreases. Members feel heard.
Conversely, social dynamics shape cognitive outcomes. When psychological safety is absent, team members withhold ideas, fail to challenge weak thinking, and defer to the loudest voice rather than the best argument. The cognitive process is compromised by social factors.
This integration has implications for how we design and facilitate creative work. You cannot optimise for creativity by focusing solely on techniques for idea generation or evaluation. The social container within which that work happens matters as much as the methods employed.
Listing Perspectives Is Not Enough—You Must Integrate Them
“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.”
One of the most striking findings from Roni’s research concerns what happens when teams surface multiple perspectives but fail to integrate them. The intuition might be that at least they tried—surely listing different viewpoints is better than ignoring them entirely?
The data says otherwise. Teams that list perspectives without integrating them actually perform worse than those who never surfaced them at all. The act of articulating different views without reconciling them may create false confidence that diverse thinking has occurred, when in fact the team has simply decorated a single perspective with alternatives that were never genuinely considered.
“Taking into account those multiple perspectives, it’s not enough just to list them,” Roni emphasises. “If you list them just to list them and then you ignore them, in fact, what we find is that those teams perform worse. If you integrate them, that’s when that synergy that we talk about comes to life.”
This connects to constraints and creativity. The more constraints you incorporate—the more factors you consider when framing a problem—the better the solution. Each perspective adds constraints that must be satisfied, forcing more creative integration.
“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 needs to be taken into account and come up with a better solution, a more effective solution.”
The alternative is discovering those constraints only after you have committed to an approach. “Instead of trying something and going but we didn’t think about this and now we encountered a block.”
The 45% Problem: Why Teams Cannot Pick Their Best Ideas
“We found that 45% of the teams selected suboptimal solutions, which scared me very much. Because if you think about it, if 45% of the teams can’t even recognize creative solutions… They didn’t even recognize the good solutions, the effective solutions. And that’s kind of scary.”
If problem construction is the neglected front end of creativity, idea evaluation is the neglected back end. Roni’s research here is genuinely alarming.
In the study, teams generated ideas and then chose what they considered their best option. Researchers then evaluated all the ideas on two dimensions: originality and effectiveness. The results were sobering.
Forty-five per cent of teams selected suboptimal solutions—ideas that were neither creative nor even effective. This was not teams choosing safe, conventional approaches over risky innovative ones. That would be understandable, if disappointing. This was teams failing to identify basic quality.
“No, no, not one team said, here’s a bad idea we’re gonna use it,” Roni observes. “They themselves thought these were good ideas when in fact our experts said no they’re not good ideas.”
What explains this? Roni suspects several factors. Teams may fail to take all perspectives into account during evaluation. They may not refer back to how they originally defined the problem, losing sight of the criteria that should guide selection. The rush to closure—the desire to have decided something—may override careful assessment.
In a follow-up study, researchers provided teams with more structure: clear definitions of what makes a solution effective and original, guidance on discussion, and in some conditions a smaller subset of ideas to evaluate thoroughly. These interventions reduced suboptimal selections to 25%—a meaningful improvement, but still a quarter of teams making poor choices.
The implication is that idea evaluation deserves as much attention and structure as idea generation, perhaps more. Yet most creative processes devote minimal time and no methodology to this phase.
The Ease Trap: Why We Systematically Undervalue Creative Solutions
The consulting world’s standard tool for idea selection—the two-by-two matrix with impact on one axis and ease of implementation on the other—may be actively harmful.
There is a systematic bias toward ease. Ideas that seem straightforward to implement receive disproportionate weight. But ease correlates with familiarity. Things we have done before feel easier than genuinely novel approaches. The matrix therefore systematically disadvantages creative solutions.
“We’re not gonna propose a risky idea,” Roni observes. “Novel ideas are risky by definition because we haven’t tried them before, we might crash and burn.”
This risk aversion compounds the evaluation problem. Teams cannot identify quality and they actively avoid novelty. The combination produces a double failure: creative ideas are not selected even when generated, and the ideas that are selected often lack basic effectiveness.
The practical response requires deliberate intervention. Teams need explicit criteria for evaluation, structured discussion processes, and perhaps most importantly, time. Just as rushing problem construction produces poor framing, rushing idea evaluation produces poor selection.
“Sometimes all you need is five to 10 more minutes of re-thinking,” Roni notes—a reminder that the investment required is often modest.
Managing the Messy Middle: Task Conflict Versus Relationship Conflict
“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.”
Creative problem-solving generates tension. Energy mounts as people advocate for different framings or solutions. This is not inherently problematic—task conflict can be productive. The challenge is preventing task conflict from becoming relationship conflict.
Roni offers practical guidance. Keep feedback focused on the task: this framing might miss certain constraints, this solution may not address the core problem. Avoid characterising people: you do not understand, you always overlook this.
But there is a harder challenge. Even well-intentioned task-focused feedback can be received as personal attack. “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.”
Leaders can help by framing the conversation explicitly: “Reminding people in the team that we’re here to come up with a better solution and you know the goal is to make sure this is constructive and not destructive is a good start.” This does not eliminate hurt feelings, but it establishes shared expectations.
When tensions rise too high to be productive, tactical interventions help. Call a time out. Get fresh air. Share a meal. These are not avoidance—they are recognition that creative work requires managing energy, not just generating ideas.
Anonymity As a Facilitation Tool
“Instead of people calling other people out or speaking out loud, so you know who provided the idea, there are 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.”
Roni describes a powerful facilitation technique: separating ideas from their sources. When contributions are anonymous, evaluation becomes less personal. No one knows whose idea is being critiqued.
The technique can go further. Ask someone to defend an idea that is not theirs. “It might be the case that it’s not your idea and you still have to provide support for it.” This removes ego from the process and forces genuine engagement with the merits of each option.
The parallel to debate training is illuminating—arguing for positions you do not hold develops cognitive flexibility and reduces attachment to particular outcomes. Applied to creative problem-solving, it enables more rigorous evaluation whilst protecting relationships.
Remote Teams: What We Know and What We Do Not
“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 in face-to-face situations and just move them to our remote arrangement. And that does not work.”
The shift to remote work created natural experiments in team creativity. Unfortunately, many organisations simply replicated face-to-face processes in virtual environments, losing the informal interactions that make in-person collaboration effective.
“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 in a Zoom format.”
Roni acknowledges that research has not yet caught up with practice. “We don’t have scientific empirical evidence yet of what works.” But she offers practical suggestions from facilitation experience.
Build informal interaction deliberately. Use breakout rooms to create smaller conversations before bringing the group together. Schedule virtual social time—bring your coffee or your beer depending on time zone. These moments cannot be left to chance in remote environments.
For important creative work, periodic face-to-face gathering remains valuable. “Bringing the team together for face-to-face meeting on occasion is helpful in building those relationships… 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.” The investment in relationship pays dividends in subsequent remote collaboration.
The neuroscience supports this. As discussed with Hilary Scarlett in a previous episode, sharing meals activates trust-building mechanisms in the brain. Mirror neurons synchronise when people are physically present together. These effects cannot be fully replicated through screens.
The Brainstorming Problem: What We Forgot Before and After
“The field, 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 evaluation and idea selection process.”
This observation deserves particular attention. Brainstorming has become so synonymous with creativity that many organisations believe they are being creative when they gather people in a room with flip charts to generate ideas. The research suggests this is precisely the wrong emphasis.
Creativity requires three distinct phases: problem construction, idea generation, and idea evaluation. Brainstorming addresses only the middle phase. By focusing attention and energy on idea generation whilst neglecting what comes before and after, organisations systematically underperform on creative work.
Problem construction—the phase Roni’s research shows consuming over half of effective teams’ time—sets up everything that follows. A poorly framed problem yields solutions to the wrong challenge. No amount of brainstorming rigour compensates for fundamental misunderstanding of what you are trying to solve.
Idea evaluation—the phase that follows brainstorming—determines which ideas actually advance. Here too, organisations struggle. As the 45% finding demonstrates, teams consistently fail to select their best ideas, leaving the most innovative solutions on the cutting room floor whilst pursuing safer, more conventional options.
Psychological Safety: The Foundation, Not an Add-On
“The first thing would be thinking about how to create that psychological safety. So what are the things that you can do as a facilitator, as a leader, to create the psychological safety and maintain it?”
When asked what advice she would give business executives preparing for creative work with their teams, Roni places psychological safety first. This is not a fashionable nod to current management trends. It reflects the evidence on what enables or inhibits creative performance.
“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.”
The specifics matter. Leaders must not only establish safety but actively maintain it. When team members behave in ways that undermine safety—dismissing ideas, dominating conversation, punishing dissent—leaders must address it directly. “If a team member is, for lack of a better word, misbehaving, calling them on it, showing that this is inappropriate behavior.”
Role modelling is essential. If leaders want an environment where constructive criticism is welcomed, they must demonstrate their own willingness to receive criticism. “If somebody criticises 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.”
Humility serves as a prerequisite for safety. Leaders who position themselves as the source of answers rather than partners in inquiry inadvertently shut down the very contributions they claim to seek.
AI and the Limits of Prediction
“What we’re finding with AI is the distribution of ideas is much more condensed. So AI doesn’t give you the really silly answers that people sometimes give. 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.”
The conversation inevitably turns to artificial intelligence. What role can AI play in creative problem-solving? Roni’s assessment is measured but clear: AI currently provides mediocre, run-of-the-mill outputs.
She offers an important caveat: “I’m speaking about AI as it exists right now. The changes in AI happen very quickly. It develops very quickly. So who knows two months from now or a year from now, my answer will be absolutely irrelevant.”
The underlying mechanism matters. AI is fundamentally a predictive tool—it determines the next most likely word based on patterns in its training data. “AI is not really thinking.”
For problem finding, this creates a fundamental limitation. “A lot of our problem finding happens because we see anomalies. Something is not working the way we expected it. AI is designed to ignore those anomalies and give you the average.”
For idea generation, AI can help—but complete reliance on it stifles genuinely creative ideas. The distribution narrows: fewer terrible ideas, but also fewer breakthrough ideas. “If what we’re looking for is mediocrity, that’s okay, but usually that’s not what we want when we’re looking for creative idea.”
For idea evaluation, AI provides common notions of strengths and weaknesses—typical assessments that fail to capture what makes an idea genuinely innovative. Humans can think beyond these standard categories in ways that current AI cannot.
The distinction between inductive and abductive thinking is illuminating. AI excels at inductive reasoning—identifying patterns in existing data. Where humans retain competitive advantage is abductive thinking—seeing connections between apparently disconnected concepts, hypothesising relationships that the data does not directly reveal.
“If you do not have the expertise, you would not know it,” Roni cautions regarding AI’s tendency to hallucinate. Domain knowledge remains essential for evaluating what AI produces. The confident tone of AI-generated content masks significant reliability problems that only experts can identify.
Prompting As the New Problem Construction
“In order to use AI correctly to help with creative thinking, you need to understand how AI operates… 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.”
Roni observes an interesting parallel between human creative process and AI use. If AI handles idea generation, where does human creative effort go? The answer: into prompting.
Prompt crafting is essentially problem construction for AI. The quality of output depends critically on how well you frame what you are asking for. Most people, Roni notes, “use one prompt, maybe fix it with another prompt. They don’t revise their prompts and don’t revise them effectively. And that gives them more of those mediocre run-of-the-mill answers.”
The implication is that as AI takes over certain cognitive tasks, human creative effort shifts rather than disappears. The skill of effective prompting—iterating, refining, approaching the question from multiple angles—becomes a new expression of the problem construction capability that humans have always needed.
This suggests that training in creative problem-solving may become more rather than less important in an AI-enabled world. The humans who can frame problems well will extract better results from AI tools. Those who cannot will receive mediocre outputs and lack the expertise to recognise their limitations.
Know When Creativity Is Actually Needed
“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.”
This might seem a surprising stance from someone who has devoted her career to studying creativity. Yet it reflects mature understanding of what creative problem-solving actually requires.
Genuine creative work—properly attending to problem construction, idea generation, and idea evaluation—demands substantial time investment. Roni’s research suggests that over half the time should go to problem framing alone. This is not a quick exercise.
If you already have a solution that works, if there is no compelling reason to change it, the investment in creative problem-solving may not be justified. “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.”
This cost-benefit perspective is often missing from discussions of innovation and creativity. There is an assumption that more creativity is always better. The research suggests a more nuanced view: creativity is valuable when problems genuinely require novel solutions, but the time investment means it should be reserved for circumstances where that novelty is needed.
“Give your team time to go through the process,” Roni concludes. Rushing creative work produces inferior results. If you cannot commit the time required to do it properly, reconsider whether you need to do it at all.
Three Things for Your Next Facilitation
Roni distils her advice into three priorities for leaders preparing to facilitate creative work:
First, build and maintain psychological safety. This is not a one-time exercise but an ongoing commitment. Model the behaviour you want to see. Address problems when they arise. Demonstrate that you can receive criticism as well as give it.
Second, attend to the entire creative process. Problem construction and idea evaluation deserve as much attention as idea generation. Resist the temptation to rush into brainstorming. Invest time in ensuring the team genuinely understands and agrees on what problem they are solving.
Third, reserve creativity for when it is genuinely needed. The time investment in proper creative problem-solving is substantial. Existing solutions that work well do not always require replacement. Focus creative effort where novel approaches truly matter.
Why This Matters Now
Organisations face mounting pressure to innovate—to develop novel products, to respond to AI-driven disruption, to navigate uncertainty. The temptation is to mandate more creativity, more brainstorming sessions, more innovation initiatives.
Roni’s research suggests this approach misses the mark. The constraint on creative performance is rarely insufficient idea generation. It is inadequate problem construction, weak idea evaluation, and absent psychological safety. Organisations that address these fundamentals will outperform those that simply demand more ideas.
The arriving capabilities of AI make this more rather than less urgent. As routine cognitive work becomes increasingly automated, the distinctively human contributions shift toward problem framing, abductive reasoning, and evaluation of AI-generated options. These are precisely the skills that effective creative problem-solving develops.
We do not need organisations that generate more ideas. We need organisations where teams genuinely understand the problems they face, can evaluate options with sophistication, and feel safe enough to challenge conventional thinking. The research points the way. Implementation remains the challenge.
Listen to the Full Conversation
Dr Roni Reiter-Palmon and Mark Blackwell explore the science of creative problem-solving, why teams struggle to select their best ideas, and how leaders can manage the messy middle of collaboration in depth.
or subscribe to “Arkaro Insights” with your favourite podcast provider: https://arkaroinsights.buzzsprout.com/
About the Speakers
Dr Roni Reiter-Palmon is the John Lewis Holland Distinguished Professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and Director of Innovation for the Center for Collaboration Science. She currently serves as President of Division 10 of the American Psychological Association, the global hub for the study of creativity in the arts. Ranked in the top 2% of social psychology researchers, Roni has authored over 200 publications, including the Handbook of Organizational Creativity, and is currently co-editing the forthcoming APA Handbook of Creativity.
University of Nebraska at Omaha: https://www.unomaha.edu/college-of-arts-and-sciences/psychology/about-us/directory/roni-reiter-palmon.php
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roni-reiter-palmon-222ba46/
Mark Blackwell is the founder of Arkaro, a B2B consultancy specialising in change management, strategy, innovation, product management, commercial excellence, and integrated business planning for the agriculture, food, and chemicals industries. Arkaro’s collaborative “do it with you” approach works closely with clients to leave behind sustainable, value-generating solutions—not just a slide deck.
Website: https://www.arkaro.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrblackwell/
Is Your Organisation Struggling with the Messy Middle of Creativity?
If your teams generate ideas but fail to select the most innovative ones… if brainstorming sessions produce lists that never translate into action… if you suspect your people are solving different problems whilst arguing about solutions… the missing element may be process design rather than creative talent.
At Arkaro, we help organisations:
- Design facilitation approaches that attend to the full creative process—problem construction, idea generation, and idea evaluation
- Build psychological safety that enables genuine creative contribution
- Develop evaluation frameworks that identify genuinely innovative solutions rather than safe, conventional options
- Embed creative problem-solving capability throughout the organisation
Our collaborative “do it with you” approach ensures your organisation develops lasting capabilities rather than dependency on external consultants. We follow a four-step process: Understand, Co-create, Enable, and Sustain—working through the messy reality of implementation rather than leaving you with presentations.
“We don’t just coach—we get on the pitch with you.”
Ready to explore how your organisation could improve creative problem-solving?
Contact Mark Blackwell: mark@arkaro.com
Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrblackwell/
Related Reading from Arkaro
On Creativity & Problem-Solving:
- Why Constraints Make You More Creative, Not Less – Dr Catrinel Tromp on why “blue sky thinking” often fails and how to distinguish fixed from faux fixed constraints
- 70% of People Are Wrong About Creativity – Dr Zorana Ivcevic Pringle on why creativity is a choice and a learnable process of decision-making
- Why AI Can’t Match Top Human Creativity – Yale research reveals that whilst average AI exceeds average human performance, top human creativity remains unmatched
- Jobs to Be Done: The Missing Link in B2B Innovation – Scott Burleson’s pyramid framework on why B2B decisions involve identity and emotional considerations
On Collaboration & Psychological Safety:
- The Neuroscience of Collaboration: The SPACES Model Explained – Hilary Scarlett on why your brain still thinks it’s on the savannah and how to create conditions for creative performance
- The Human Factor in AI Implementation: Lessons from Aviation – Barry Eustance on why AI implementation requires human oversight and shared accountability
- What Flying a Plane Taught Me About Collaborative Leadership – How aviation transformed from rigid hierarchy to collaborative leadership that saves lives
- Why 95% of AI Implementations Fail – Neuroscience explains resistance and how the PEOPLE Framework ensures success
On AI & Human Capability:
- Rewire or Retire: Why AI Is a Leadership Issue – Marco Ryan on why leaders must become digitally curious and find their AI whisperers
- AI & the Octopus Organization – Stephen Wunker on why organisations need distributed intelligence with aligned intent
- AI and Jobs to Be Done: Where Human Judgement Trumps Technology – Scott Burleson on AI’s critical limitations in prioritisation and abductive reasoning
- Constraints, Playfulness & Ethics: 3 Lessons for Leading in the AI Age – Dr Vlad Glaveanu on why constraints enable creativity and ethics must guide what we build
On Strategy & Adaptive Approaches:
- The 5 Disqualifiers of Strategy – Pete Compo’s tests for whether your strategy provides real guidance or is just a list of aspirations
- Beyond the Tyranny of the Mid-Case: Why Your Scenario Planning Is Killing Your Strategy – Pete Compo on why averaging scenarios destroys strategic thinking
- Strategy in a VUCA World – The Cynefin Framework and adaptive approaches for volatile, uncertain, complex environments
- Mission Command: Leadership for VUCA Environments – Adrian Stratta on military principles for decentralised decision-making in business
- Why Smart Companies Miss Disruption: The 3 Ghosts Blocking Innovation – Scott Anthony on past traumas, present patterns, and identity fears that prevent action
External Resources
Book: Handbook of Organizational Creativity edited by Roni Reiter-Palmon
Forthcoming: APA Handbook of Creativity (co-edited by Roni Reiter-Palmon)
University of Nebraska at Omaha Center for Collaboration Science: Research and resources on team creativity and collaboration
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