Creative Thinking

(sometimes called Lateral Thinking).

Seeing the connections between things or ideas which were previously unrelated.

This is a way of thinking and, more importantly, a way of behaving which succeeds in relating, or linking, things or ideas which were previously unrelated.

Creative thinking (or lateral thinking as it is sometimes called) is most helpful when tackling open-end problems where you can:

• Challenge the constraints because they aren’t fixed
• Envisage many alternative, equally viable solutions.

In denary mathematics there is no point in applying creative thinking to the problem 1 + 1 = because there is one correct answer. On the other hand, the problem ‘In how many ways can you interpret 1 + 1 =?’ has dozens of possible answers which creative thinking would help to generate. Most interesting and major problems in life are open-ended, even though people often treat them as though they were closed-ended.

Creative thinking doesn’t solve problems – not even open-ended ones. It merely gives more, and better, alternatives to choose between.

Creative thinking is therefore not an alternative to analytical (or vertical) thinking. To solve open-ended problems successfully you need both sorts of thinking: creative thinking to generate lots of ideas and analytical thinking to tidy up afterwards by evaluating the worthwhileness of the ideas and deciding which to implement.

There are lots of techniques to aid creative thinking, mainly because people, left to their own devices, are so bad at it. The argument is that to happen at all, creative thinking needs to be special. Each technique provides a temporary haven, or protection, from the habits of analytical thinking.

Here are four of the better-known creative thinking techniques:

Challenging assumptions

Simply write down the initial definition of a problem and underline all the words in it that are debatable or challengeable. Then take each underlined word in turn and question it.

Attribute listing

List all the attributes or characteristics of the thing involved in a problem. Then take each attribute in turn and use it as a trigger to spark off ideas.

Random stimulation

When you aren’t making progress with a problem or when you want some novel inputs, use a dictionary to provide a random word. Simply think of a number in advance (or throw some dice, or use a table of random numbers) and turn up that page in a dictionary. Use a second random number to select a word on the page. Then spend three to five minutes generating ideas that come when the problem and the random word are thought about in combination. Often the random word is used to generate further words which themselves link up to the problem. In some cases a pun on the word may be used, or its opposite, or the word spelled slightly differently. There is no one correct way to use it. The word is used in order to get things going – not to prove or solve anything.

Brainstorming

This provides a formal opportunity for people to make suggestions they would not otherwise dare make for fear of being thought stupid or being laughed at. In summary, brainstorming involves the following stages:

1. The chairman states the problem.
2. The group joins in, restating the problem and listing statements in the form ‘How to …?’
3. The group selects a basic restatement and the chairman writes down ‘In how many ways can we…?’
4. The chairman explains and displays brainstorming rules:
   • Think wild
   • Cross-fertilise
   • Suspend judgement
   • Go for quantity.
5. The group does a warm-up session on a neutral problem – ‘Other uses for a…?’
6. The group brainstorm:
   • Aim for 100 ideas in 20 minutes
   • Display ideas on flipcharts
   • Number each idea
   • Include 30-second silences to aid cross-fertilisation.
7. The chairman selects the wildest idea: ‘Let’s see if we can make something of…’

You may be worried that the very formality of these structured techniques will inhibit rather than encourage creative thinking. This particularly applies if you regard creative thinking as essentially a spontaneous happening. The trouble with this is that you would have to wait until people were in the right mood to be creative. The idea of the techniques is to use them to engineer the conditions that trigger creative thinking. Make the right environment and creative behaviour will flourish.