Creators, Critics and the Beauty of Ugly Ideas
On What Happens When We Create Too Little and Critique Too Soon, and Why the New Needs Friends
One of my advisors in graduate school, a brilliant and creative statistician, once shared a story from his first job teaching calculus at a large public university. He taught two sections of Calc I for non-majors—same material, same exam.
After the first test, he noticed something odd. One section had students who answered every question. The work was messy, sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but always complete. The other section had beautiful, perfect answers, but many questions were left completely blank.
He dug into it. The first group? Future engineers. Their instinct was to solve the problem however they could. The second? Physics majors. Also brilliant, but their internal critics wouldn’t tolerate an imperfect answer. They’d skip questions they weren’t 100% sure about.
That tension between getting to an answer and ensuring it is perfect has stuck with me. Some people lean toward creation. They try, iterate, and push forward, albeit imperfectly. Others lean toward critique. They seek precision and hold back until the answer is just right.
That tension isn't just between people. It lives within us: the drive to create versus the urge to hold back. It plays out in teams, in who takes the lead and who says wait. It’s wired into org charts, cultures, and incentives. It can shape entire political and economic systems too (think the NIMBYs vs. the YIMBY). It's the tug-of-war between the engine that generates variance and change and the breaks that protect the mean and status quo.
In this deep dive, I discuss two functions: the creative function, which generates new ideas and solutions, and the critic function, which tells the first why their ideas just won’t work.
The Architecture of Value Creation
One of my favorite recent papers on creativity is “Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Ideas” by Karan Girotra, Christian Terwiesch, and Karl Ulrich, published in Management Science. I like it for many reasons, but most importantly, it lays out what I think of as the architecture of value creation more clearly than almost anything else I've read.
The first point they make, I think, is crucial. Most of the time, you’re not optimizing for whether your average idea is good. You’re trying to find the best idea.
The paper makes this point visually and analytically. In the figure above, they break down the “idea generation” and “selection” process into four core variables:
The number of ideas generated
The average quality of the ideas
The variance in the quality of those ideas
The ability to select the best one
It is clear from this schematic that if you only generate one idea, that idea better be amazing. It's your only shot. But if you generate dozens or hundreds, the odds go up that at least one will be great. Of course, that assumes two things:
you’ve got people generating a large volume of ideas (and hopefully not all terrible ones), and
you have a system that can reliably pick out the best idea(s) from the noise.
That’s the tension this framework captures so well. The generation process is all about creating variance. You need to generate lots of ideas with wide-ranging quality. Some will be duds. But that is OK. Some might be brilliant. But you won't find the brilliant ones if you don't create lots of ideas in the first place.
Then comes the selection process, the “critic” function. At this stage, judgment, evaluation, and discernment matter. Someone or something has to sift through the ideas and evaluate whether they have any value (or not.) If the critic function doesn’t work well, the ultimate idea you invest in may cost you a lot.
While this paper takes a particular approach to the “creation” and “critique” (generate ideas separately, then come back and evaluate them together), I think many potential mechanisms can serve these functions (including artificial ones). What’s also clear is that overemphasizing one function (e.g., critique) at the expense of the other isn't helpful and will undermine value creation.
The Creator Function
The creativity literature is expansive, and I won’t attempt to do it justice in this post. If you're interested in digging deeper, I recommend checking out several books on the topic, especially the work of Teresa Amabile, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and two recent favorites by non-academics: David Kelley’s book on Creative Confidence and Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act.
The Girotra et al. (2010) framework offers an interesting starting point: how do we design the “Creator function” to generate a large volume of diverse ideas? Conceptually, assuming we are working within a combinatorial innovation model, the goal is to start with as many discrete components as possible and then combine them in novel and unexpected ways.
McCrae and colleagues' work on the psychological construct of openness to experience suggests that some individuals have a personality that mirrors this “creator” function. They are curious about the world, aesthetically sensitive, imaginative, intellectually engaged, and comfortable with novelty and ambiguity. For example, someone who is aesthetically sensitive might be moved by a piece of music, architecture, or design in a way that sparks new ideas (“Wow, that’s beautiful”). Intellectual engagement might manifest as a fascination with abstract theories or a tendency to chase down rabbit holes across disciplines (“Oh, that’s interesting”). Comfort with novelty and ambiguity means these individuals are less likely to run away when faced with uncertain or unfamiliar situations. They might lean in and see them as opportunities (“Hmm…that’s odd”). While these creative minds can generate endless combinations, the quality of the ideas depends on the quality of the raw material they have to work with.
In other words, these people are wired to generate variance. Their minds move across disciplines, explore ideas that do not quite fit, and remain open to ambiguity rather than avoiding it. These tendencies may not always be efficient, but they are often generative. Not every idea will be good, and that is just fine.
The creative function depends on the capacity to produce many ideas of varying quality. Only a few need to be exceptional. What matters is the willingness to keep generating without allowing an overly harsh internal critic to intervene too early or too often.
This creator function doesn’t reside only in the individual mind; it can also operate at the level of teams, organizations, regions, and entire economies. The underlying logic remains remarkably consistent. Whether we are talking about a person or a system, the basic building blocks are the same: how many discrete components are available at the outset, how often they are recombined or reimagined, and how frequently new ones are introduced. A team with diverse perspectives and experiences, for example, is more likely to come up with novel combinations than a group that draws from a single disciplinary, demographic, or cultural background. The same holds for organizations or regions that attract talent from across the world. In each case, the capacity of the function to generate a wide variety of ideas increases.
The Critic Function
Great, now you’ve got a lot of ugly ideas. And maybe, just maybe, hidden among them is a gem. Something so unexpected, so powerful, that it could create untold value for society. But how do you find that one idea worth betting on?
What you need is the Critic Function.
The Critic Function’s main job is to judge. This is good. This is not.
And when you step back and think about it, it’s actually quite striking how pervasive the Critic Function is in society. Books. Movies. Restaurants. Academic papers. Startups. Stocks. Everything has critics. There are professional critics, and there are lay critics. Everywhere you look, someone is evaluating, reviewing, scoring, or rejecting. If you are interested in the sociology of critics, a recent review of these market intermediaries by Sharkey, Kovacs, and Hsu (2023) is worth reading.
Why are critics so pervasive?
I think it stems from simple math: The cost of implementing an idea is usually much higher than the cost of generating one. Given that resources (journal pages, money, etc.) are finite, someone has to decide what moves forward and what doesn’t.
So, what is the impact of critics and critical judgment on innovation?
There is substantial evidence that critics generally disfavor novelty (Lane et al. 2021). For instance, a study by Siler, Lee, and Bero (2014) discovered that while peer reviewers can typically distinguish between low and high-quality work, unconventional studies are more likely to be rejected. They state: “Our research suggests that evaluative strategies that increase the mean quality of published science may also increase the risk of rejecting unconventional or outstanding work.” Boudreau et al. (2016) also found that experts were significantly more inclined to judge novel work and that which is intellectually close to them as inferior. An interesting finding by Azoulay et al. (2019) shows that, at times, the gatekeepers who hinder novelty in their field are eminent scientists themselves. Indeed, when these gatekeepers pass away, the field experiences a surge of new ideas from outsiders previously kept on the periphery. This penalty for novelty is not confined to academic peer review; Hsu (2006) identifies this effect in the context of films that span multiple genres. Paolella and Durand observe this effect within law firms and their services, while Kovacs and Jonsson (2013) find it with restaurants that offer multi-cuisine menus as well.
The Value of the Internal Critics
But critic functions are not always bad—particularly an internal critic, whether at the individual or organizational level. My colleagues Ronnie Chatterji, Rick Larrick, Roger Masclans, and I, in a paper titled “Taste Before Production: The Role of Judgment in Entrepreneurial Idea Generation,” ran a field experiment to test the value of having a refined internal critic in the quality of ideas people generate. We find that the ability to generate high-quality entrepreneurial ideas improves when individuals are trained to evaluate ideas more rigorously. In a randomized experiment with MBA students, a brief intervention focused on idea evaluation led participants to assess others’ ideas more accurately and produce ideas that were more complete, better calibrated, and more aligned with expert assessments of fundability. The largest improvements came from those with the weakest initial judgment, indicating that entrepreneurial judgment is a learnable skill.
Similarly, having a low-cost critical function at the organizational level may encourage more innovative ideas. In another paper titled Experimentation and Startup Performance, my colleagues Ronnie Chatterji, Rembrand Koning, and I examine the role of experimentation (scientifically testing ideas with A/B testing) in early-stage startups, using data from 35,000 startups over four years. A/B testing helps organizations apply judgment, not through someone’s opinion, but through evidence. We find that those that adopt A/B testing experience large and rapid gains, somewhere between 30 and 100 percent improvement in key performance metrics within a year. This top-line finding suggests that A/B testing is not a marginal technical tool but a core strategic capability that enables better critique of ideas through faster, cheaper judgment. What is also interesting is that we find that by reducing the cost of testing ideas, startups generate more variance (because now it’s cheaper to sort through it). They launch more products, make larger changes, and move faster toward scale or fail. The effects are especially pronounced among smaller and earlier-stage ventures, suggesting that experimentation lowers the cost of learning what works.
However, this internal critic function has to be structured the right way in order for organizations to benefit from it. Otherwise, it can stall any innovation. In a paper I co-authored with Todd Hall titled Organizational Decision Making and the Returns to Experimentation, we show that depending on how the critic function is implemented within an organization, you get very different outcomes: decentralized models (the idea generator is the critic) drive high innovation but come with high volatility, while centralized models (decision by committee) reduce risk but often stall meaningful change; the best results come from a simple but high threshold rule that everyone abides by, which delivers high performance with low volatility.
I could go on forever with the amount of research about the critic's function. People have studied various contexts, such as peer reviews and movie reviews, among others. All this to say is that the critical function is varied, and how it is implemented affects the kind of innovation we end up getting. But it is nevertheless critical to have ideas that create real value.
All of this research points to a central insight for me: the critic function is everywhere, and how we design and deploy it shapes the kinds of ideas that survive the gauntlet. Critic functions are not inherently good or bad, but overemphasizing or misapplying them can limit the innovation we seek to foster.
I see this dynamic up close in the classroom.
Balancing the Creator and the Critic
I teach in a business school; we lean mostly toward analysis and the development of judgment among our students. Our pedagogical goal is to sharpen their ability to evaluate and make better decisions under uncertainty. The critic function.
In strategy, for instance, we teach students how to dissect a case, challenge assumptions, and identify risks in CEOs' decisions. We ask them to demonstrate clarity of thought and rigor in their arguments. These are no doubt essential skills.
Our PhD education is quite similar: In our seminars, we ask students to read and then dissect papers they do not yet have the skills to write. We make them little Anton Egos, who can’t cook a meal but can flippantly judge it as too salty or overcooked. Overdeveloping the critic function too early has tremendous risks, in my view. If we are not careful, we risk training great critics who will never learn to create. I’m reminded of a quote by Ira Glass:
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” - Ira Glass
The New Needs Friends
I’ve always loved elementary school classrooms. They feel so creative: colorful, filled with art, markers, crayons, and construction paper. The chairs can be moved around for different projects and teamwork. The space feels personal, reflecting the identity and personality of both the teacher and the students. Student projects from this and past years are hung up on the walls. There are cozy spaces where kids can grab a book and read or grab a crayon and draw. There is a sense of both creativity and continuity.
A question I have been thinking about a lot recently is how we can regain this feeling in the context of higher education (and particularly business education, where I work). I don’t have a full set of ideas just yet, but here are some things I’ve been thinking about and how they map to the work of McCrae and his colleagues on Openness to Experience:
The environment matters. Whiteboards, markers, Post-its, prototypes, failed experiments. Make the space feel lived in and a little weird. Somewhere that feels comfortable and real. Aesthetic Sensitivity.
Protect early-stage ideas. Create projects where judgment doesn’t show up too early. Let things get weird. Encourage the creativity. Comfort with Ambiguity.
Celebrate the generators, not just the evaluators. Give creators the status they deserve. It’s easy to sound smart by tearing things down. But when you’re proposing something new, something that doesn’t quite fit together yet, you might look a little stupid. Kill that off too early and people stop trying. Celebrate Imagination.
Design for building, not just critique. We have plenty of review meetings. But where are the build sessions? The ones where people feel comfortable making new things? Engagement and Curiosity.
Play and fun are, in my mind, first-order principles. People do their best creative work when they’re having fun. Engagement and Curiosity.
Give unstructured time. There’s already too much time pressure. Give people hours, days, even weeks to play with ideas. Don’t demand deliverables too quickly. No deadlines. Just space to think and explore. Engagement, Imagination and Curiosity.
Ideas need room to wobble. Give people the chance to experiment. Let the idea crawl before you expect it to run. Comfort with Ambiguity.
These principles aren’t rocket science. Honestly, I more-or-less lifted them from my observations of the Stanford d.School, an off-shoot of Stanford’s mechanical engineering department. When founded, it had the spirit of an elementary school inside one of the greatest universities in the world. It’s no surprise that its ethos took off in the 2010s. People were hungry for a creative space.
Compare these environments to the typical college classroom. Below is a space built for critique, not creation. Fixed seating, forward-facing rows, clean walls, quiet order, and the pressure to sound smart rather than create.
Let’s Honor the Creators
With that, I’ll leave you with a parting quote from Anton Ego:
“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.
The next great idea probably won’t arrive looking polished. It will be a little awkward, a little messy, and it will need a friend.