In selecting the most creative people or ideas to hire or implement, many organizations use multi-step processes that winnow the initial pool to a group of finalists and then select “the best of the best” from the finalists. Research conducted in which the authors were involved found that such an approach may be a waste of time and resources and that the experts trying to pick the winners from the finalists agonize and can’t really determine the clearly superior choices. A better approach might be: keep the selection criteria for identifying talent or potential rela
