Are you looking to improve your creative thinking skills so as to impact your breakthrough thinking? Don’t believe you are creative? Creativity is often defined as the ability to connect ideas that are seemingly unconnectable.
Connecting ideas are how new ideas originate … it is the basis for creativity. Most of the time we time in terms of finding more ideas to add to our list of consideration … the more new ideas to connect, the more chances of improving your creativity.
But it doesn’t always work that way. Often you can rekindle your creativity by adding constraints to your problem space. Have you ever been successful in trying this technique?
My son once came back from a trip during which he broke a guitar string that he could not replace. He was actually delighted with the experience, having had to invent a different way of playing the instrument, and discovering new harmonies.
With one string missing, he had to work out the others to a whole new level. And voila … he used a part of his creativity he had never exercised.
This is a creative classic.
Other examples include legislation on car emissions that have led to the creative changes to the combustion engine and the rise of hybrid and electric vehicles. Another good example is Apple making the explicit decision to ban the use of a stylus, which led to the famous touch-screen products that we all know.
Examples of creative thinking.
Creative design can be enhanced not always by adding new degrees of freedom, but sometimes by cutting some degrees of freedom.
Sharing a story of creative thinking
We are always on the lookout for good stories. Stories to illustrate points we are emphasizing. So we read a lot. Today’s story is about generating ideas. Ideas from convergent thinking.
The story is about why you should ask why. It comes from Ideas Champions. A consulting company like us (but bigger and more well-known), who specialize in creativity, innovation, team building, and leadership. All favorite topics of ours. So we keep up with this team.
The story is about a big problem with one of our favorite monuments – the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC.
Simply put, birds — in huge numbers — were pooping all over it, which made visiting the place a very unpleasant experience.
Attempts to remedy the situation caused even bigger problems since the harsh cleaning detergents being used were damaging the memorial.
Fortunately, some of the National Parks managers assigned to the case began asking WHY — as in “Why was the Jefferson Memorial so much more of a target for birds than any of the other memorials?”
A little bit of investigation revealed the following:
The birds were attracted to the Jefferson Memorial because of the abundance of spiders — a gourmet treat for birds.
The spiders were attracted to the Memorial because of the abundance of midges (insects) that were nesting there.
And the midges were attracted to the Memorial because of the light.
Midges, it turns out, like to procreate in places where the light is just so — and because the lights were turned on, at the Jefferson Memorial, one hour before dark, it created the kind of mood lighting that midges went crazy for.
So there you have it: The midges were attracted to the light. The spiders were attracted to the midges. The birds were attracted to the spiders. And the National Parks workers, though not necessarily attracted to the bird poop, were attracted to getting paid — so they spent a lot of their time (and taxpayer money) cleaning the Memorial.
How did the situation resolve? Very simply.
After reviewing the curious chain of events that led up to the problem, the decision was made to wait until dark before turning the lights on at the Jefferson Memorial. About as simple a solution as you could get. Right?
That one-hour delay was enough to ruin the mood lighting for the midges, who then decided to have midge sex somewhere else.
No midges, no spiders. No spiders, no birds. No birds, no poop. No poop, no need to clean the Jefferson Memorial so often. Case closed.
Now, consider what “solutions” might have been forthcoming if those curious National Parks managers did not stop and ask WHY:
Hire more workers to clean the Memorial
Ask existing workers to work overtime
Experiment with different kinds of cleaning materials
Put bird poison all around the memorial
Hire hunters to shoot the birds
Encase the entire Jefferson Memorial in Plexiglas
Move the Memorial to another part of Washington
Close the site to the general public
Technically speaking, each of the above “solutions” was a possible approach — but at great cost, inconvenience, and with questionable results. Not great solutions.
The bottom line
To be effective in this new era, we as creative thinking business people need to see our jobs differently. No more just focusing on metrics like clicks, video views or social media shares. We must successfully integrate our function with other business functions to create entire perspectives that serve the customer all the way through their experiences throughout the business.
We can do better. Much better. But first, we need to stop seeing ourselves as crafters of clever brand messages and become creators of positive brand experiences.
There can never be enough focus on continuous improvement on brand marketing, independent of how well the business is doing. It seems we all are looking to take our success to a new level. This is an excellent time to make a statement with their creative thinking. Changing before you have to is always a good idea.
Do you have any similar stories of creative design to share with this community?
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Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new innovative ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Do you have a lesson about making your innovation learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on continuous learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
Humans spend about half of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing in the present. A now-famous Harvard study illuminated this reality, using an iPhone app that pinged participants at random times throughout the day and asked them what they were thinking about. Mind wandering?
It found that 50% of the time, their minds were wandering from their current task. Also, they were significantly less happy when their minds were roaming than when they were focused on the present.
This is probably because of most of the time; the mind is just generating noise and gibberish. Gibberish like worries, memories, reenactments of the way things should have been, and projections of the future. It’s easy to get swept up in our thoughts, and sometimes it’s addictive.
Mind-wandering allows one part of the brain to focus on the task at hand, and another part of the brain to keep a higher goal in mind. Christoff (2009) at the University of California, Santa Barbara has evidence that people whose minds wander a lot are more creative and better problem solvers. Their brains have them working on the task at hand but simultaneously processing other information and making connections.
A wandering mind takes more in: good and bad. This leads to new ideas. But it can take you up — and it can take you down.
Focus doesn’t allow the noise in. But the noise is what allows creativity to spark.
You already have rituals that put you into a zone; you just may not realize it. What you want to do is use them deliberately
But it’s not very pleasant, as most of us know and studies have found, and it’s not great for mental health over the long term.
Build a team whose members have diverse backgrounds and mindsets. This broadens the creativity process.
Each person will contribute different thoughts and ideas, which lead to unique conversations when everyone comes together. The education, background, and experience of individual members lead to a creative group.
Team members will learn from one another. Different perspectives lead to new skills and effective innovation strategies. The result is a stronger team equipped to take on new challenges and quickly solve problems of all sizes.
If you feel like your mind is everywhere but in the present, here are some of the methods that both history and science have proved work to pull yourself back into the present.
How do you get focused? How do you unwind? Here is why mind wandering leads to the best learning. Start using these more deliberate techniques, and you can make yourself happier as well as more creative when you need to be.
Wandering is the mind’s natural state
The most common view of the human mind assumes that our normal way of thinking consists of concentrated focus upon immediate tasks at hand. But researchers have found that this is not the case.
Daydreaming is now considered to be the normal state of our minds, with focus appearing as a break from the more common mind wandering. A recent study has found that our mind wanders forty-seven percent of the time we are awake with very few activities not equally peppered with natural periods of daydreaming.
The fact that daydreaming is the natural state of the human brain suggests that those who take most naturally to daydreaming will best exhibit the skills necessary for successfully navigating the human world. Far from representing a lack of discipline, daydreaming is a hallmark of a healthy and active human mind.
Breathe
This is a great method because it’s one that works even if you don’t believe it will. People have used breathing to calm their nervous systems over millennia, and science has recently shown why it works, neurologically.
There’s a cluster of cells in the brainstem that controls different types of breathing—sighing, laughing, gasping, and others. A slow breathing subgroup was identified earlier this year, by researchers who also noted its projections to higher areas of the brain, involved in arousal and wakefulness.
Have a mini-interaction with nature
Lots of evidence spending time out in nature helps mood, well being, and stress levels. But not everyone can jaunt out to the forest when they’re feeling overwhelmed. Interestingly, a new study reported that just a momentary interaction with an item of nature had a big influence on mental health.
Meditate
This is probably one of the hardest things to make yourself do in a moment of anxiety, but it also may be the best. Though meditation has been linked to myriad neurological and psychological benefits over the long term, luckily most experts agree that even a few minutes of sitting and focusing the mind can do a lot to calm it.
Mindfulness training has been shown to quiet the areas of the brain that are responsible for the chattering of the monkey mind—and within seconds. So try sitting and focusing on anything you choose—the breath; a short mantra, either in your head or aloud; the sounds in the room or outside.
Every time your mind wanders, simply note that, and bring it back to what you were focusing on. That’s what the practice is—redirecting our attention, again and again.
Motivation
It’s a truism that our “dreams,” by which we usually mean our goals and desires, motivated in life. What is less recognized, however, is the central role played by the process of daydreaming in envisioning and imaginatively experiencing the lives we wish to lead and people we want to become.
Our goals and desires are what they are because we have spent time freely living through our daydreams what it would be like to achieve them. For these reasons, daydreaming in learners is related to higher levels of ambition and a deeper sense of motivation.
Increased insight
Did you ever wonder what causes that moment of insight when something suddenly clicks, or a solution becomes clear? The answer is a lot of hard work on the part of your brain that goes unnoticed.
Moments of insight, those sudden revelations that seem to come from nowhere, are long prepared for through the brain’s ongoing hidden organizing and processing. Daydreaming, as a mental state activating both the default and executive networks of the brain, plays an important role in that organizing and processing. What you may think is your mind drifting is your mind actively forming connections between information, synthesizing what was previously only chaos, and preparing the ground for the moment when things suddenly fit into place.
Confidence
Freely imagining “what you would do if…” is far from idle. Having envisioned scenarios and played out possible events gives us an increasing sense that we can handle them.
In this way, the imaginative anticipation that often occurs in daydreaming contributes as much to a robust sense of confidence as it does to a healthy motivation.
Think about it this way; daydreaming is a training ground for your mind where it plays through and sometimes struggles with scenarios it has not experienced or wants to react differently to in the future.
Though successful training certainly doesn’t guarantee success during the real event, it does provide a mental preparedness and a firm sense that no matter what may occur we can deal with it.
For this reason, some of the most confident learners are also those with the healthiest daydreaming lives.
Talk to someone
Being stuck in your head can be destructive partly because there’s no real order to the monologue, and no sounding board to help put things in perspective.
And part of the reason that therapy, talking to a friend, and even journaling are all effective in reining in mind is that they provide perspective—the very act of crafting your thoughts into a coherent narrative helps you understand them better.
Creative thinking can be an extension of ordinary mind-wandering, the researchers explained, and a growing body of research has linked daydreaming with creativity.
In highly creative people, psychologists have observed a tendency toward a variation on mind-wandering known as “positive-constructive daydreaming,” in which has also been associated with self-awareness, goal-oriented thinking, and increased compassion.
As this study suggests, a healthy amount of daydreaming is connected to improved critical thinking capabilities, an invaluable characteristic in successful learners.
It has also been shown that daydreaming is dramatically more present in those considered to be of superior intelligence when compared with learners of average intelligence.
Split second thinking
In his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Malcolm Gladwell discusses the phenomenon of “thin-slicing,” the mind’s jumping to conclusions based on surprisingly little information.
Despite what we tend to assume, Gladwell demonstrates that jumping to conclusions based on limited information is often statistically the most reliable way to arrive at the right decision.
The key point about thin-slicing is that its effectiveness depends upon two factors. Knowledge, especially when derived from experience, and mental integration that allows for swift access to the knowledge and experience we have gained.
If we return to our image of daydreaming as the training ground of the mind, the increased integration it imposes on knowledge and experience we have collected improves our ability to jump to conclusions based on little information successfully.
It makes us more successful thin-slicers and improves our split-second decision making.
Better problem solving
Better problem solving.
What is problem-solving? From what we have already said we might suggest it is an effective use of the default and executive networks of the brain resulting in increased intelligence, critical thinking, insight, and thin-slicing.
The argument that the integration of default and executive networks results in improved problem solving is offered by the author of Daydreams at Work: Wake Up Your Creative Powers, Amy Fries. In an article in Psychology Today: “…your mind-wandering capacity is like that computer program–it can get to solutions that your conscious mind just can’t see.”
In general, daydreaming makes us better thinkers. Being better thinkers makes us better learners.
Staying cool
The traditional view of daydreaming understands it as a form of escapism.
We are unhappy or uninterested in where we are and so imagine we are somewhere else. It is important, this view assumes, to resist this escapist urge and instead cope with the world as it is. It turns out. However, that daydreaming is itself a central element of our mental coping mechanisms.
As already mentioned, daydreaming provides the brain with the exercise course where it can secretly play out different solutions to problems.
More than this, however, those precious daydreaming moments allow us the conscious rest necessary to face difficult tasks or situations with a fresh mind.
During these seeming moments of rest, the brain is still hard at work beneath the surface organizing potential responses without the awkward interference of conscious thought.
The bottom line
Coping is a key element of mental elasticity, the ability to shift our thought and behavior smoothly in response to changing situations and information.
Daydreaming, as the practice ground for mental processing, greatly increases the mind’s ability to shift in the face of unanticipated events and situations smoothly.
So while daydreaming clearly contributes to organizing information and experience we have already learned, making the learned material more useful by improving our ability to apply it, it also enhances our response time in the face of the unexpected.
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your continuous learning?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
More reading on learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
A young Albert Einstein struggled to solve the perplexing problem of relativity. He took to one of his many famous thought experiments and imagined what he would see if he traveled alongside a beam of light. By imagining the perspective of such an observer, he was able to improve his creative thinking skills.
A creative imagination can help get us outside of the proverbial box.
But, ironically, imagining that which we have never experienced can only by realized by the experiences we have.
Lev Vygotsky stated:
“the creative activity of the imagination depends directly on the richness and variety of a person’s previous experience because this experience provides the material from which the products of fantasy are constructed. The richer a person’s experience, the richer is the material his imagination has access to.”
Creative thinking skills.
Therefore, a great way to improve our critical thinking skills is to improve the diversity and quality of our experiences.
Listen to a genre of music you would ordinarily never listen to. Watch some movies you would normally scoff at.
Take up a hobby you’ve never considered. Forcing yourself into experiencing the world in new ways helps you be more creative and imaginative.
By having a diversity of experiences, you have more building blocks to build your imagination with.
When my two children were younger, they were fortunate to inherit several large bins of Legos from a family friend.
What made their eyes light up was not just that there were so many pieces but that there were so many different types. There were helicopter pieces, house pieces, car pieces, animals, people—you name it.
The diversity gave us (yes, me too) the ability to build so many more imaginative things.
If we compared that to a box of 10,000 pieces—but all of the same size, shape, and color—the extent of imaginative possibilities would likely be limited.
In the same way, a diversity of experiences can give your imagination more to build from.
Creative thinking skills … build on others
One of the misunderstandings around creativity and imagination is that you have to be utterly original to do it.
The truth is all creative people stand on the shoulders of those who came before.
Writers learn to write by reading. Painting students are sent to museums to copy the masters. Great chefs learn the already tested basics of cooking to create some new dish.
Innovation stands on a platform that already exists.
Yes, inspiration is involved, those flashes of insight, the ah…ha moments. You start with something that already exists and takes it to another level.
So relax. Let go of thinking you have to do something original. Take the pressure off.
Celebrate that there is all this help available.
Investigate ‘thought experiments’
Construct a few of your own. One such experiment might be to imagine you are a microscopic entity and place your awareness somewhere in your room.
Perhaps leaping from key to key on your keyboard..inhabit the keyboard with a world of imaginary civilizations.
Enact massive wars on a microscopic scale, within your mind…again, let your mind run free.
Develop a taste for novelty
Explore artwork and the result of other people’s imagination. Discover how other people conceived their ideas. Look at the abstract and surreal artwork on Deviant Art.
Change your thought patterns
By this, I mean consciously make an effort to look at the world differently and in a more creative way, as if you were a child.
On a more intellectual level, attempt to vocalize these creative insights.
The more you make an effort to see novel ways of looking at the things, the more these efforts will turn into habits, and the easier it will become.
People are rarely born creatively acute, or funny, or negative, or optimistic; it is learned behavior.
The underlying behavior of creative people is their thought patterns are creative.
Creative thinking skills examples.
Question everything
Want to think what nobody has ever thought? Start by questioning all assumptions.
There comes a moment in time where everyone agrees with everybody about pretty much everything.
For any sized organization that is focused on creating a culture of relentless innovation, hardened dogma is an innovation obstacle they must overcome.
And that starts best with questioning everything, assumptions included.
Pay attention to patterns
Treat patterns as part of the problem. Recognizing a new pattern is very useful, but be careful not to become part of it.
Observe with all senses
Truly creative people have developed their ability to observe and to use all of their senses, which can get dull over time.
Take time to “sharpen the blade” and take everything in. Add thoughts as you go.
Meet new people
Brian Grazer is an Oscar-winning producer and co-founder of Imagine Entertainment. In his book, A Curious Mind, he writes about a personal discipline he has had since his earliest days in Hollywood.
In what he calls “Curiosity Conversations” Brian would schedule meetings with top influencers in the industry.
He found such benefit from these encounters that he branched out to meet with the most successful people in all areas of life.
He has met with Jonas Salk, Barack Obama, 50 Cent, Muhammad Ali, Gloria Allred, F. Lee Bailey, Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban, Henry Kissinger, John McCain, Wolfgang Puck, Ronald Reagan, Condoleeza Rice, Tony Robbins, our Betty above Edwards, and countless others.
“It’s refreshing to be reminded, over and over, how different the world looks to other people.” — Brian Grazer
Each meeting exposed him to new angles on familiar concepts and produced an understanding of altogether unfamiliar ideas.
By gaining different perspectives from different people he has been able to imagine and produce stories in a way, he might not otherwise—stories such as A Beautiful Mind, Splash, The Da Vinci Code, Apollo 13, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and many others.
In the same way, by opening ourselves to new people, we open our minds to new understandings of the universe.
As we develop relationships with different people, we will find the quality of our imagination increased.
Continuous learning
Both creativity and innovation are based on knowledge.
Therefore, you need to continually expand your knowledge base.
Read things you don’t normally read as often as you can.
Defer judgment
Your perceptions may limit your reasoning. Be careful about how you perceive things.
In other words, defer judgment. Let it all hang out.
Experience as much as you can. Exposure puts more ideas into your subconscious.
Actively seek out new and very different experiences to broaden your idea thinking experience portfolio.
Look for what is not easily seen
Look where others aren’t looking to see what others aren’t seeing.
Creative thinking techniques.
Be observant
Betty Edwards is a world famous author and art teacher known for helping people see what is in front of them as opposed to their perceptions of what they see.
For instance, the average person asked to draw an apple will produce an image symbolic of an apple. Such a drawing often has a high degree of abstraction to catch the essence of apples everywhere.
It’s called drawing what you know, not what you see.
Someone trained to see models properly, however, will draw an apple in front of them with great realism. The exact contour, the angle of the stem, blemishes, even tonal differences are repeated in exact detail.
Her students often produce the symbolic version on the first day of her course and end with extraordinary examples of the realistic.
To produce such results, Dr. Edwards teaches a technique of viewing models upside down to trick the definition-prone left hemisphere of the brain to bow-out.
In its absence, the spatially-oriented right brain can begin to dominate perception. Invariably, observation improves dramatically and immediately because of the part of the brain that judges and names what it sees take a backseat.
Drawing is one of the only ways I know of that this degree of improvement in observation can be developed.
When I was taught this method in my college graphical drawing class, I immediately began to notice things for what they were.
I could see shape and form as something very individual to each person or object I drew. Texture and tone became real to me. I even began to experience light.
A deliberate way to strengthen our experiences is to become more observant by recording them through drawing.
Be able to overlook rules
Rules, to the creative person, are indeed made to be broken.
They are created for us by other people, generally to control a process; the creative person needs the freedom to work.
Ask“what if…”
Seeing new possibilities is a little risky because it means that something will change and some action will have to be taken.
Curiosity is probably the single most important trait of creative people.
Push the boundaries of mistakes
A photographer doesn’t just take one shot, and a composer doesn’t just write down a fully realized symphony.
Creation is a long process, involving lots of boo-boos along the way. A lot goes in the trash.
Collaborate
The hermit artist, alone in his garret, is a romantic notion but not always an accurate one.
Comedians, musicians, painters, chefs all get a little better by sharing with others in their fields.
The bottom line
Since as much as 90% of what we learned in a life-time always come to us via visual cues, we should constantly enhance our perceptual sensitivity to the environment, according to information scientists.
So, more than 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci was right when he said, use all our senses, especially our sense of sight.
Our power of observation and imagination depends on it.
Productive thoughts often have their origins in the combinatorial play and dynamics of sensory inputs from environmental cues.
In my view, our thinking cap is often governed by how far we can stretch our power of vision and imagination.
Need some help in capturing more improvements for your staff’s leadership, teamwork, and collaboration? Creative ideas in running or facilitating a team or leadership workshop?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your continuous learning?
Do you have a lesson about making your learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
More reading on creativity from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
