Defer Judgment, Go for Quantity
During divergent phases, withhold all evaluation — no scoring, no ranking, no "yes, but." Volume precedes quality; the pool must be large before selection is meaningful.
- Osborn (1953) and Linus Pauling: "the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas"; IDEO targets ~100 ideas in 60 minutes of ideation
- Evaluation apprehension — the fear of social judgment — is one of the three primary suppressors of group ideation (Diehl & Stroebe, 1987, 1991); withholding evaluation removes this suppressor
- Amabile's Intrinsic Motivation Principle (1983, 1996): external evaluation during generation shifts motivation from intrinsic to extrinsic and measurably suppresses creative output
- Divergent thinking metrics — fluency (quantity), flexibility (category variety), originality (novelty), elaboration (detail) — are all maximized before convergent selection begins
- Concretely: set a count target before evaluating ("let's get to 15 ideas before we talk about which ones are best")