Creative Thinking and Brainstorming

J. Geoffrey Rawlinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351947749
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Brainstorming is probably the best known of all the techniques available for creative problem solving. This book, by one of the world's foremost exponents of brainstorming, begins by identifying the barriers to creative thinking and showing how they can be removed. It goes on to set out systematic procedures for organizing effective brainstorming sessions, for evaluating the ideas produced, and for introducing the brainstorming approach into an organization. This is a highly practical book, illustrated throughout by examples drawn from the author's experience with nearly eight hundred groups of managers in four continents.

1 Creative thinking

One of the prerequisites for the application of creativity techniques is an awareness of the barriers which hinder creativity, and their removal. This chapter first defines creative thinking, distinguishing it from analytical thinking, and goes on to identify the major barriers which hinder creativity.

Without exception, everybody has creative ability. One only has to watch, unobserved, the games which young children play on their own or in groups, to see how strongly this ability is present. Unfortunately, as children grow up they are conditioned to submerge this creative ability within other abilities. Life at school in the educational routines that they have to follow, and subsequent education in university, technical, professional or practical fields develop the other abilities strongly at the expense of the innate creative ability. In fact, it goes further — in many cases the creative approach to tackling problems is actively discouraged.

There is a story of a university student sitting a physics examination. One question asked, 'Given a barometer, how would you tell the height of a tall building?'. The student answered as follows: 'I would take the barometer to the roof, lower it on a piece of string to the ground. I would then haul it up again, and measure the length of the string'. The examiner was not pleased and awarded the student no marks. On disputing this award, the student asked for an independant arbitrator to adjudicate. The arbitrator, hearing both sides, offered the student another chance at the same question. The student accepted, and wrote his answer: 'I would measure the barometric pressure at ground level and on the roof. The difference can be converted into the height of the building'. The examiner, sensing defeat, accepted the answer, and awarded 98 percent. The arbitrator later asked the student why he had tried to make a fool of the examiner. The student first gave some further answers — why not try it for yourself before looking at the end of this chapter? — and then said: 'I am fed up with your physics course inhibiting my creativity. I wanted to demonstrate that there were other, equally valid, answers to the question'. (NB Other answers to the barometer question, and to the puzzles appearing later are given at the end of the chapter.)

In other words, the educational system unwittingly raises barriers, which prevent men and women from being creative. It is these barriers which must be identified and removed. Further, in the creative situation, such as a brainstorming session, these barriers must be lowered, for they have no part to play in the free-wheeling atmosphere engendered. On several occasions, I have arranged for a hat stand to be placed outside the room in which the brainstorming session is to be held. When the participants arrived, they were asked to go outside the room and hang their barriers on the hat stand!

Analytical and creative thinking

Consider this problem:

A Scotsman was celebrating his golden wedding anniversary with a family reunion. He had arranged a dinner party in a private room in a local hotel with a piper to welcome his guests on the bagpipes. Shortly after the party started, he looked around the family and noticed that there were present:

1 grandfather	2 sisters
1 grandmother	2 sons
2 fathers	2 daughters
2 mothers	1 father-in-law
4 children	1 mother-in-law
3 grandchildren	1 daughter-in-law
1 brother

Being a canny Scotsman, he had budgeted carefully, and had the exact money to pay for the party in his sporran. Assuming that the piper was included in the cost of £10 per head, how much money did the Scotsman have in his sporran?

A swift glance at the list of guests and adding up the numbers would lead to a figure of £230. Not believing that the Scotsman would be so rash as to spend £230 on a dinner for his relatives, a second and possibly more suspicious look at the family leads to the realisation that some members of the party may have dual roles, i.e. as a father and a son. This leads to a reconsideration of the family and saves the Scotsman a considerable amount of cash.

Apart from a slight feeling of being led up the garden path, or being fooled, the solution to this problem requires logical thinking or counting, and it leads to a unique answer. Because logical thinking or counting is involved, let us define this problem as an analytical problem. (A comment on the size of the Scotsman's family is made at the end of this chapter).

Consider now another problem: Suppose you were invited to join a government department on secondment from your organisation. You find that the team of civil servants and yourself are considering the problem — 'How to persuade families to take their holidays in Britain this year?' This is a different sort of problem from the Scotsman's family. Not just one answer, there are many possible ways of persuading people to take their holidays in Britain. It does, however, need a certain amount of imagination to overcome the image of mackintoshes and wet walks, particularly when confronted with glossy brochures showing seaside places in the Mediterranean. As imagination is involved, let us define this as a creative problem.

We identified two sorts of problems — analytical and creative — and logically enough, two sorts of thinking are required. These are shown in the Figure 1.1, together with four of the technical terms associated with analytical and creative thinking.

Analytical thinking is logical and leads to unique or few answers, which can be implemented. Creative thinking requires imagination, and leads to many possible answers or ideas. While the two sorts of thinking are different, they are linked because one sort complements the other. This is evident in creative thinking, where the many ideas must later be analysed to sort out the few that can be implemented. Analytical thinking consolidates ideas and practices, and must be followed by creative leaps if progress is to be made.

Figure 1.1 contains four of the technical terms, or 'buzzwords', which are common in the vocabulary of management. These are 'convergent, divergent, vertical and lateral'. In contrast to most buzzwords, these four are simple, straightforward words which convey easily understood meanings.

Figure 1.1 Two sorts of thinking

Analytical thinking is convergent, narrowing down to unique answers or a small number of ideas which can be further analysed and implemented. Creative thinking is divergent, starting from the description of the problem and diverging to give many ideas for solving it, or possible answers to it. In effect, analytical thinking produces solutions and creative thinking produces ideas — large numbers of them from which the solution can be selected. Convergent and divergent are appearing more frequently in the literature of creative thinking and in the articles in management papers. The two words are more colourful than analytical and creative and they do convey a mental picture of the process being followed.

The other two words — vertical and lateral — are less well-known but are equally applicable in the context of analytical and creative thinking. Tackling a problem in the analytical way requires deep, and possibly narrow, probing to identify all aspects — hence vertical thinking. On the other hand, creative thinking requires a wide-ranging examination of all the options, including those which might be considered to be wild or foolish, and those which appear to be outside and not linked at all with the problem — hence lateral thinking. Of the two words, lateral thinking is the commoner due to the work on creative thinking by Doctor Edward de Bono (see Bibliography on page 119).

The two sorts of thinking can be linked in another way.

Figure 1.2 Two sorts of thinking

In Figure 1.2, convergent (analytical) and divergent (creative) thinking are illustrated with few solutions and many ideas. The process can be continued indefinitely, where creative thinking is again used on a solution to generate more ideas. The figure has two misleading features. The perspectives of analytical and creative suggest that people are better at creative thinking than analytical. As we shall see, the reverse is true. Secondly there is the deliberate separation of analytical and creative, and this is not representative of real life. Everybody has a creative ability. Unfortunately it is buried within analytical thinking, and this tends to kill the creative ideas too quickly. 'That's silly' we say, and the idea is discarded. Conscious and deliberate separation is required.

As a final example, imagine you have a piece of 5-ply board, which has three holes cut in it. The holes are triangular, circular and square in shape. You are asked to describe a solid wooden object which will go through each hole, right through and pull clear of the back. When the object is in any hole, it is a tight fit, i.e. the wooden surface touches the 5-ply board at all points of the hole.

At first thought, this seems an impossible object. It is easy to get two out of the three. For example a wooden cone satisfies the circle and triangle, and a pyramid satisfies the triangle and square, but all three seem quite impossible. One non-solution is a rod, machined circular at one end, triangular in the centre, and square at the other end. Unfortunately this object will not pass completely through the board.

The solution requires both creative and analytical thinking: creative in seeing the solid wooden object (in your mind's eye); analytical in being able to describe it simply in words. A drawing of the object appears at the end of this chapter. Looking at this, it is clear that the three vi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Creative thinking
• 2 What is brainstorming?
• 3 Successful brainstorming
• 4 Evaluation
• 5 Introducing brainstorming
• 6 For instances
• 7 Related techniques
• Bibliography
• Glossary of Terms
• Index