when you put off a task, you buy yourself time to engage in divergent thinking rather than foreclosing on one particular idea. As

Leader Actions: A. Sparking Original Ideas 1. Run an innovation tournament. Welcoming suggestions on any topic at any time doesn’t capture the attention of busy people. Innovation tournaments are highly efficient for collecting a large number of novel ideas and identifying the best ones.2 Instead of a suggestion box, send a focused call for ideas

“Minority viewpoints are important, not because they tend to prevail but because they stimulate divergent attention and thought,” finds Berkeley psychologist Charlan Nemeth, one of the world’s leading experts on group decisions.13 “As a result, even when they are wrong they contribute to the detection of novel solutions and decisions that, on

Jost’s team developed a theory of system justification.7 Its core idea is that people are motivated to rationalize the status quo as legitimate—even if it goes directly against their interests.

I want to debunk the myth that originality requires extreme risk taking and persuade you that originals are actually far more ordinary than we realize. In every domain, from business and politics to science and art, the people who move the world forward with original ideas are rarely paragons of conviction and commitment. As they question

Idiosyncrasy credits accrue through respect, not rank: they’re based on contributions.

Whether you’re unhappy with your job, your marriage, or your government, decades of research show that you have a choice between exit, voice, persistence, and neglect.27

Simonton finds that on average, creative geniuses weren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a higher chance of originality. “The odds of producing an influential or successful idea,” Simonton notes, are “a positive function of the total number of

To sustain our originality as we age and accumulate expertise, our best bet is to adopt an experimental approach. We can make fewer plans in advance for what we want to create, and start testing out different kinds of tentative ideas and solutions.