“Closing Down”: A Classification of Creative Decision‐making Aids

It has been recently argued that managers do not use creative problem‐solving techniques because of concerns about managing the ideas produced. This paper examines five different ways of “closing down” during creative problem solving, and suggests factors which influence the selection of a technique: voting is the preferred choice for consensus‐seeking; clustering is a means of transforming data qualitatively; hurdles provide a means of managing data arriving over disparate time periods; weighting is best reserved for standard and quantifiable data; while gut feel can deal best with decision making involving “fuzzy” data. A psychological rationale for the use of the various techniques is proposed, and a contingency model of decision making developed which may give managers confidence to experiment with the creative problem‐solving mechanisms for generating options, because of increased knowledge of effective mechanisms subsequently for closing down those options.