Research on group creativity is dominated by an idea generation paradigm in which brainstorming, and in particular, a process in which idea selection follows separately after idea generation, is fundamental to the creative process. However, studies of groups involved in the creative act suggest that highly creative groups do not always follow this process. In this paper, we present an inductive, qualitative process analysis of twenty of the meetings of four healthcare policy groups tasked with producing creative output. We find that the groups use four different processes to generate creative output – brainstorming, sequential processing, parallel processing, and iterative processing. We propose that an iterative process, in which groups cycle back and forth between ideas over time, refining and evaluating them, facilitates collective engagement in the group task, and we link this process to creativity. This challenges the brainstorming model of group creativity, and suggests that idea generation and idea...