If you're wondering what effect virtual meetings are having on your team's creativity, you might be interested in a recent study published in Nature: Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation. One of the study's authors discussed their findings in a complementary video called Why video calls are bad for brainstorming.
To quote the video's summary of the findings:
"Simply being in the same physical space as someone else improves idea generation."
The experiment included a laboratory study and a field experiment across five countries that compared physical brainstorming sessions with virtual ones. They asked teams to generate creative uses for a frisbee and for bubble wrap. They found that
more ideas were generated by the in-person brainstorming pair compared to the virtual one.
They also asked the same participants to select the idea that they thought was most creative. In this instance, the virtual setting proved to be more conducive to selection of the most creative idea (though I suppose determining "most creative" is a little subjective).
When trying to figure out why the in-person setting was more conducive to creativity, they realized that in a virtual setting people are looking at each other more. This means they were not as focused on the task and not taking advantage of a larger shared environment that is present during an in-person setting. As a result, the person that set up the study recommends turning off the camera during idea generation.
Interesting findings that you might want to consider for your own creative teams, especially if they're forced to work virtually in most cases.
Now on to this week's hand-picked productivity links!
