Does Quantity of Ideas Lead to Quality? What Research Says

Pauling's line sounds like a slogan, but research on creativity supports it: when you need one good solution, the first idea that comes to mind is rarely the best one. Studies keep finding the same pattern: the quantity of ideas you produce predicts how many good ideas you end up with. Below is what that research shows, and why it does not mean you should collect hundreds of ideas and stop there.

Pauling said these words to Fortune magazine in 1960, and later he gave a longer version of the same advice: you have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones. The second half of that sentence matters as much as the first.

Quantity breeds quality: Osborn's brainstorming rules

Alex Osborn, an advertising executive, described group brainstorming in his book Applied Imagination (1953). His rules for a session were simple:

• No criticism of any idea during the session.
• Every wild idea is welcome.
• Quantity is wanted.
• Combine and improve the ideas of others.

The third rule is often summed up as "quantity breeds quality": the more ideas on the table, the higher the chance that at least one of them is useful. Osborn also kept two stages apart, generating first and judging later, because evaluation that starts too early tends to stop the flow before anything unusual appears.

The equal-odds rule: more attempts, more hits

Psychologist Dean Keith Simonton studied the careers of famous scientists, composers and writers. In a 1997 paper in Psychological Review he described what is now called the equal-odds rule: the share of hits in a creator's work stays about the same, whether that person produces a little or a lot. So creators with more finished works also have more hits, and also more misses.

This is the honest version of the quantity argument: producing more ideas does not make each idea better. It gives you more attempts, and each attempt has roughly the same chance of success. If you want more good results, you need more tries, and you also need a reliable way to recognize which tries actually worked.

Why a later idea tends to be more original

There is also a reason inside a single session. In a 2012 study, Roger Beaty and Paul Silvia asked 133 young adults to list unusual uses for an everyday object for ten minutes, and three raters scored every response. Responses became more creative over time, while the number of new responses was highest in the first minute.

Psychologists call this the serial order effect, and the practical lesson is simple: the first idea that comes to mind is usually a common one, shared by almost everyone. Once it is written down, you have to search further through memory, and that is where less obvious ideas appear. If you stop at the third idea, you often stop before the interesting part begins.

Quantity of ideas first, depth second

Ideation puts depth over breadth, because a hundred shallow ideas are not worth much on their own. This does not contradict the research above; it describes the next step.

A large quantity of ideas is how you find the few that deserve your time, and depth is what you do with them afterwards. The process has three parts:

1. Generate. Write down every rough idea that appears, without judging it.
2. Sort. Keep what clicks, delete the rest and star the key ones. Sorting is thinking too: it teaches you to tell a strong idea from an empty one.
3. Go deeper. Take the two or three ideas that hooked you and ask what is underneath: why it matters, how it would work and what would break it.

Skip the first step and you spend your effort on the most obvious idea. Skip the other two and you end up with a long list that nobody uses.

How to do this in Ideation

1. Write a topic: a goal, a question or a doubt.
2. Pick up to three roles. For range, try Universal, Critic and Motivator together.
3. Read the short thoughts as they appear, and tap Keep thinking for more ideas on the same level.
4. Sort them: swipe right to add a thought to Favorites, swipe left to delete it. Deleted thoughts tell the roles what not to suggest again.
5. Tap a thought that hooks you. It goes to Favorites, its branch opens, and the roles think about that thought one level down. Add your own thoughts along the way.
6. Open the Thought map to see the whole tree, or Export the board when you are done.

More about branches and roles is on the help page.

Many ideas give you the raw material. Throwing most of them away and going deep into the rest is where the good idea appears.