What is Creative Thinking?
by Stephen Williamson
Creative thinking is the process of developing useful ideas or novel and productive ways to conceptualize and do things. Creative thinking may involve artistic achievement or it may involve new or different ways of doing things.
Creative thinking is also about finding ideas and creating actions as a result of those ideas.
Imagine yourself digging a hole. If you keep digging you will always be in the same hole, but bigger. If you jump out of the hole and digger several other holes, you are always creating new holes. You are being creative.
Most creative ideas are solutions to a problem. Post-its arrived because a not very sticky glue had been invented for which no use could be found. Who needs a glue that is not very good at sticking things together? It was only when someone had the idea of applying the glue to little bits of paper that could then be easily stuck to things and removed easily.
Creativity is one of the character traits that positive people have. In Positive Psychology their are 24 positive character traits that need to be developed in order to have a happy and positive life. Master creativity, and you only have another 23 to go!
Where Did Creativity Go?
You may find that you felt more creative as a child. You were exposed to creative activities - playing a role in imaginative play, making drawings at school, curious about new ideas and situations. As language developed, you thought of more and more new ideas. What happened to that creativity? The sad thing is that as you got older, constancy and stability took over, and you found yourself needing to be creative less and less. You may also have found that other things have stifled your creativity. Fear of failure, fear of the unknown, not wanting to move out of your ‘comfort zone’. You may simply have turned into a dull person.
The good news is that like learning to drive a car or learning a new language, creative thinking is a skill that can be learnt, rekindled and improved. The best way to hone this skill is by doing every day. This may take some effort, and certainly will not be improved by being a couch potato that watches television for hours. Some effort is required, but the results in terms of a happier, more fulfilling and zestful life are well worth it.
You may also find that you become more wealthy the more creative you are. The world values creative thinkers and is often willing to pay its thinkers well. Though the creative individual will thrive in the world of media and arts, there are other areas where creative thinking is prized such as:
- Research and development - The creative thinker comes up with new products.
- Teaching - the creative teacher inspires their pupils.
- Therapy - The creative therapists finds new ways to improve their client’s lives.
- Sales and marketing - The creative marketer comes up with new and novel ways to present products
Entrepreneurs are creative people, always trying to think up new products or services to sell to their clients.
Can you really learn creativity? There is plenty of evidence to say that it can. For example:
According to the Wall Street Journal, a two-year in-house creativity course at
General Electric resulted in a 60% increase in patentable concepts.
At Sylvania, several thousand employees took a 40 hour course in creative
problem solving. The result: $20 of extra profit was made for every $1 spent on this course..
Very creative people are not necessarily a lot brighter, or are all there ideas necessarily great. What they do is generate lots of ideas knowing that one or two of these ideas will be great.
The best time to start is today!
Where do new Ideas come from?
Creative thinking involves the production of new ideas. Where do these ideas come from? You cannot will a new idea to just appear. Your mind needs to start a process from which this new idea will emerge.
Your brain recognizes patterns and loves repetition. Take two unrelated words such as balloon and car and try to come up with a new idea from them. Examples that you may come up with are:
A giant balloon that acts as an inflatable car jack.
A balloon that is filled with helium that lifts the car clear of a traffic jam.
A strong balloon inside the car that acts as an air bag to protect passengers.
Try this exercise with other seemingly random nouns such as a toothbrush and a snowman. A hill and a tiger. An apple and a beauty queen.
By combining two entirely unrelated ideas you come up with a new idea. Your brain looks at the combination of words and tries to come up with a way to make sense of the novel combination. Your brain loves to make unusual and novel combinations.
Another way that new ideas arise is by ‘free association’. Try writing using a pen and paper. Just let words arise in your mind, then write them down. Don’t try to think hard about what to write about, just let the ideas flow almost of their own volition. One idea may lead to another. Some ideas may be nonsense, but occasionally a fresh, insightful idea will emerge.
Here is an example of this:
“John went down to the hardware store to buy sweets, but when he got there they had ran our of nails, so he bought screws instead which he used to secure his bed to the floor so that he would not disturb his neighbours when he tossed and turned at night when he dreamed of being a famous jockey winning the Kentucky Derby in which he was given a prize of a gallon of Kentucky Whiskey which he took back with him to the hardware store who swapped the liquid for a brand new gleaming horse head bicycle which he chained to his bed for safe keeping until his mother came home…”
OK, most of the above is pure junk, but if I kept at it long enough, the associations of ideas that emerge could spark some original idea to appear.