The more, the merrier: Does quantity breed quality?

One dictum of creativity that is seldom questioned is that you need to generate as many ideas as possible, because the more ideas you have, the better your chances of having super creative (useful and original) ideas. But is this true?

The equal-odds rule

The equal-odds rule states that you should generate as many ideas as possible, to up your chances of having great ideas. Why? Because all your ideas have an equal chance to be great ideas.

According to its proponents, thinking up ideas is like playing roulette: the more you play and the more squares you bet on, the better your chances of hitting it lucky. The rule implies that people who have had super ideas—Mozart, Beethoven, Einstein, Bell, Edison, Shakespeare—had them because they had so many not-so-good ideas. Masterworks were created only after a substantial number of mediocre works had first been created. It is thus not practice or expertise that lead to great works, but the number of works (Simonton, 2006). Of course expertise plays a role, and evidence seems to indicate that it takes about a decade to become an expert in any field (Kaufmann & Kaufman, 2007), but this factor is not conclusive.

Later breeds greater …

A different view of the quantity-breeds-quality axiom is that of Alex Osborn, the ‘father’ of brainstorming. He believed quantity leads to quality because great ideas were more likely to surface later in a brainstorming session (Osborn, 1963). As early ideas are unlikely to be the best ideas, the longer you spend thinking up ideas, the better your chances of coming up with a sterling idea. This conclusion implies that most people, regardless of their level of creativity, will begin by giving obvious or mundane ideas, lacking in originality. It seems that true creativity is only arrived at after the store of obvious ideas have been depleted (Russ & Dillon, 2011).

Yes or no?

Several studies have suggested a link between quantity and quality (Reinig & Briggs, 2013; Jung et al., 2015). However, other studies have concluded that, under some conditions, quantity does not correlate with quality (Reinig & Briggs, 2013), suggesting that neither the equal-odds rule nor Osborn’s conjecture is true in all situations. The goal of idea-generation in creativity and problem solving is to come up with good ideas, not a large number of ideas; a large number of ideas is only useful if it contains high-quality ideas. Some researchers have even found a strong connection between quantity and the number of bad ideas {Reinig & Briggs, 2008}.

The BIT theory

Bounded ideation theory (BIT) suggests an explanation of this discrepancy by offering six factors that strongly influence the quality of ideas:

1. Cognitive ability (particularly intelligence and knowledge).
2. Understanding of the problem (underlining the importance of defining a problem as accurately as possible).
3. Ability to focus and what you are prepared to focus on (how open minded you are).
4. Level of exhaustion.
5. How motivated you are to solve the problem.
6. How large the solution space is. The solution space is the number of possible solutions to a problem. Searching for a title for a fiction or non-fiction book may seem to have an infinite solution space (an almost infinite set of possibilities), while looking for ways to travel to a conference has a finite, and probably small, solution space.

(Briggs & Reinig, 2010; Reinig & Briggs, 2013.)

Any or some of these mechanisms may have been at play during studies about the quality-quantity relationship, decreasing creativity and leading to incongruent results.

The theory implies that equal odds apply only when all other factors are equal.

And so?

Many, many factors influence creativity. So is it a good idea to try to come up with as many ideas as possible?

On the whole, the evidence suggests yes, idea-quantity leads to idea quality (Adánez, 2005; Paulus, Kohn, & Arditti, 2011; Jung et al., 2015). In particular, better ideas are produced once the obvious and mundane ideas are out of the way.

What about the contradictory findings then?

There are many possible explanations for the discrepancy in findings. The studies used various definitions of the words ‘creative’ and ‘quality,’ and various ways to measure creativity. Some of these measures led to contradictory results even when applied to the exact same data set. The study by Jung et al. (2015) focused on only one aspect of creativity—fluency—the number of ideas produced.

The studies also set up ideation sessions of varying lengths, from 5 to 30 minutes.

The last factor may be particularly important if Osborn was right that better ideas occur later in a brainstorming session. Five minutes may not have been enough time to reach that stage.

It also seems, however, that a point is reached where quantity no longer translates into quality. Once this point is reached, fewer high-quality ideas are produced, no matter how long the ideation session is.

Bibliography

Adánez, A. M. (2005). Does quantity generate quality? Testing the fundamental principle of brainstorming. The Spanish Journal of Psychology, 8(2), 215–220.

Briggs, R. O., & Reinig, B. A. (2010). Bounded ideation theory. Journal of Management Information Systems, 27(1), 123–144.

Jung, R. E., Wertz, C. J., Meadows, C. A., Ryman, S. G., Vakhtin, A. A., & Flores, R. A. (2015). Quantity yields quality when it comes to creativity: A brain and behavioral test of the equal-odds rule. Frontiers in Psychology, 6. http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00864

Kaufmann, S. B., & Kaufman, J. C. (2007). Ten years to expertise, many more to greatness: An investigation of modern writers. Journal of Creative Behavior, 41(2), 114–124.

Osborn, A. F. (1963). Applied imagination: Principles and procedures of creative problem-solving (3rd ed. rev.). New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Paulus, P. B., Kohn, N. W., & Arditti, L. E. (2011). Effects of quantity and quality instructions on brainstorming. Journal of Creative Behavior, 45(1), 38–46.

Reinig, B. A., & Briggs, R. O. (2008). On the relationship between idea-quantity and idea-quality during ideation. Group Decision and Negotiation, 17(5), 403–420. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10726-008-9105-2

Reinig, B. A., & Briggs, R. O. (2013). Putting quality first in ideation research. Group Decision and Negotiation, 22(5), 943–973. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10726-012-9338-y

Russ, S. W., & Dillon, J. A. (2011). Associative theory. In Encyclopedia of creativity (2nd ed., Vol. 1, pp. 66–71). London: Academic Press.

Simonton, Dean Keith. (2006). Creative genius, knowledge, and reason. In Creativity and reason in cognitive development (pp. 43–59). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press.