Adam Grant

There’s an amazing study by Justin Berg, a Stanford Graduate School of Business professor. He looks at circus performances—think Cirque du Soleil—and collects all these original acts done by different kinds of circus artists: jugglers, dancers, acrobats. He asks people to evaluate their own performances, and then he asks managers to evaluate them as well, and then he has performers judge each other’s videos.

Finally, he looks at how well the videos do with the audience, and who the best forecaster is of which original ideas will succeed. Sure enough, people are horrible at judging their own performances, and the managers tend to be way too closed to the most novel acts. The best forecasters are the performers judging each other’s performances. They have the distance that we don’t have from our own ideas, but, unlike managers, they also tend to be open to novel possibilities because they’re in a creative mind-set.

What we need to do to become better at judging ideas is to teach ourselves to think more like creators. The way that Berg does this is that he has people generate a few ideas of their own right before they evaluate somebody else’s ideas. Being in that mind-set of generating new possibilities and thinking creatively increases your openness to novel performances.

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