Is Your Office More Creative Than You?

Office work environments have gone through a series of changes over the decades, and those aesthetic changes evoke the perceived character and quality of the workers and the company’s capacity for innovation. Standard ceiling lighting and office furniture, neutral-color walls, and formal atmospheres represent a serious, business-as-usual environment designed for maintaining productivity. An office with bright or odd-colored walls, unique light fixtures, unusual furniture, vibrant artwork, and a casual and playful atmosphere brings to mind a place where creative and innovative people thrive.

The approach is that a playful environment naturally yields brilliant ideas. Does it work? Empirical evidence for their effectiveness has remained remarkably thin. My colleague Manuel Sosa and I conducted four experiments involving more than a thousand participants. We tested how these spaces affect divergent thinking, or the cognitive process of generating many distinct solutions to an idea generation task. Our findings showed that unconventional workspaces do not always boost creativity, and in many cases, they actively hinder it. These environments become a cognitive trap when a task allows the mind to anchor to the architecture, objects in the room, and other environmental features, tethering the imagination to the immediate surroundings rather than setting it free. This becomes especially dangerous when solutions for the task at hand can be inspired by features of the workspace.

The Anchor Effect

In our first study, we randomly split participants between a conventional workspace and an unconventional one featuring unfinished ceilings, graffiti-covered walls, and colorful beanbags. We assigned a classic creativity task, which was to list as many objects as possible that incorporate a circle. To our surprise, those in the whimsical room performed significantly worse. They produced fewer ideas, and their suggestions lacked originality.

This is a phenomenon we call “cognitive anchoring.” When the human mind encounters a problem, it hunts for a starting point. An unconventional workspace provides vivid, salient cues like colorful artwork, unique light fixtures, or quirky props. While these aim to stimulate, they often bind the imagination.

In our experiment, participants in the “fun” room simply looked around. They saw steering wheels, globes, and stop signs drawn on the wall and wrote them down. Their brains took the path of least resistance. By shifting from big-picture exploration to local observation, they lose the mental momentum that fuels truly original thought. This finding goes against the prevailing thinking that unconventional workspaces lead to creative thinking and innovation. Counterintuitively, if the task at hand relates too closely to the environment, the result could be less interesting and unimaginative.

Ironic Attachment

However, our research revealed that the negative effect of the unconventional space can be reversed to become positive when the solutions for the task at hand cannot be inspired by features of the workspace. When we gave participants a task unrelated to their surroundings, brainstorming practical uses for an everyday item rather than circular objects, the vibrant environment allowed them to outperform their peers in the dull environment by roughly thirteen percentile points in terms of the number of ideas generated and eleven percentage points in terms of the originality of those ideas.

There’s this funny thing that happens when we try too hard to design what is believed to be a “creative” office. Too many firms imitate Google or Facebook, workspaces that are perceived to be innovative, and managers become disappointed when they don’t get the results they expected. For employees to get into that flow state where they are thinking differently, the space needs to be a bit more open-ended. It’s about giving the brain a little spark without providing it with the answers. Build an atmosphere where people feel mentally limber, where it’s okay to be curious, and respect how the people inside it think.

If we want people to think outside the box, we have to be thoughtful about what we’re putting inside the box with them. The best creative spaces remind you that you’re free to wander. Instead of trying to “design” creativity, we should be designing the freedom to just step away for a second. That’s when the good stuff happens.

Read the full paper, “Spaces for Creativity: Unconventional Workspaces and Divergent Thinking,” in Management Science.