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Creative types who’ve had their ideas deep-sixed by managers will probably not be surprised by Stanford research indicating managers are not the best judges of good ideas. But neither are creatives good judges of their own proposals.
According to Justin Berg, a Stanford Graduate School of Business professor, the best judges are the creator’s peers, because they’ve spent time generating their own ideas about the situation.
“Managers Are Not Always the Best Judge of Creative Ideas” talks about a large study Berg conducted on creative forecasting (or predicting the success of new ideas) in the circus arts industry.
In the study, he found creators overestimated how well their own videos would do with the audience, but were more accurate judges of their peers’ videos than managers.
“A key to creators’ advantage over managers was that creators were able to recognize value in the more novel ideas, or the performances that deviated from conventional circus art,” reports the article. “Managers tended to undervalue novel ideas in favor of conventional performances. While some novel ideas did poorly with the audience, some of the most successful videos were highly novel acts. Creators were better than managers at predicting these novel hits,” even though most of the managers were former creators.
“One might think that if you’re a successful creator, you have good taste, and when you get promoted to a manager role, it stays with you,” Berg says in the article. “But this research suggests that the creator role may promote good taste, while the manager role may undermine it.”
