Designer Decisions

How creative teams decide, and how those decisions go wrong. 115 creative professionals at IDEO and JWT each described a project that succeeded and one that failed — 350 projects for 130+ companies across 11 offices on six continents. We transcribed what they said, coded it, and counted.

Two views of the same interviews. Conditions of Creative Collaboration: 252 projects with a clear outcome, told in the interviewees’ own words — filter by office, firm, and outcome and read the conditions each project ran under. Patterns in Success and Failure: 31 cognitive biases counted across the same interviews — which lean toward success, which toward failure, and when in a project they tend to appear.

The patterns wheel reads like a flower: navy spikes radiate outward for passages found in success stories, coral spikes inward for failure, and the outer ring groups biases that tend to co-occur. Click any spike for what the pattern sounds like in practice, how common it is, and what typically comes next.

Some patterns are warning signs — like reactance (pushing back on constraints) and premature idea evaluation (killing ideas too early). Others signal healthy creative thinking — like the Ikea effect (pride in what you’ve built) and appeal to novelty. The difference between the two is the difference between projects that thrive and projects that collapse.