The Creative Thinking Handbook

Your Step-by-Step Guide to Problem Solving in Business

Chris Griffiths, Melina Costi

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780749484675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Decision Making
• Index: Business

More than 82 per cent of companies believe creativity directly impacts results, yet few of us understand how it comes about or how to put it into practice. Some people say that creativity is about thinking outside the box, while others believe it is about being creative inside the box; but what if there is no box? The Creative Thinking Handbook argues that we need to identify and remove the 'box' around our thinking, so we canunlock unlimited streams of creativity for professional and business success. This book offers an integrated system of personalized insights, along with clear, practical tools and strategies - including the tried-and-trusted Solution Finder model.The authors show you how to develop your creative problem-solving skills to make better decisions with an individualized step-by-step strategy. Based on long-term research and testing of the creative thinking process, The Creative Thinking Handbook helps you generate more ideas and find brilliant solutions for any professional challenge.

Part One

Thinking About Your Thinking

1. 01 The Decision Radar
2. 02 Common thinking errors: selective thinking
3. 03 Common thinking errors: reactive thinking
4. 04 Common thinking errors: assumptive thinking

01

The Decision Radar

The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning, and doesn’t stop until you get to the office.

– attributed to ROBERT FROST

Mind-numbing patterns

The quote above might well be said in jest, but it communicates a crucial point. Most of us go through our lives without being aware of the thinking processes behind the decisions we make or activities we perform. We operate on autopilot – we wake up in the morning, get dressed, journey to work, and go about our daily tasks without giving it much thought.

This is because the human mind works on pattern and rule recognition. The brain is bombarded with oodles of information all the time. If it tried to evaluate each and every individual bit of data in real time, it would shut down. So, to cope with this, the brain groups information into patterns or rules and then operates on these high-level sets of data, rather than concerning itself with low-level details. Look at language, for example. When you’re learning to talk and read, you have to create patterns for letters, words and sentences. Over time these patterns become well established and neatly logged into your brain. So now, as you’re reading these pages, you don’t have to stop and think about what you’re processing, you just put together words and sentences into recognizable patterns.

Our default patterns can be very useful and practical most of the time. They make it easier to get things done, particularly dull and boring things. When you get dressed in the morning, you don’t consciously think about the sequence of how you’ll put on your clothes. Once you’ve chosen what to wear, you don’t have to make any decisions at all about getting dressed; you just do it. You automatically follow your getting-dressed pattern. In the same way, you follow your going-to-work pattern and brushing-your-teeth pattern.

As you can expect, this automatic thinking and behaviour is ideal for routine work tasks as it puts us in the right frame to tackle things quickly and efficiently. For instance, we might have found an approach that works exceptionally well for dealing with awkward customers and will use it time and time again with great success. We don’t have to waste our energy reinventing the wheel each time we encounter that same problem. Our routine patterns allow us to get on with the business of living… But what about the business of succeeding?

While these pre-programmed actions save us valuable time and effort, they can also make us blind to other opportunities. As our mind recognizes and stores patterns, they become entrenched and difficult to change, so we remain stuck on one path.

Try solving this number task.

ACTIVITY The equation

Look at this equation:

Figure 1.1 The equation

As you can see, it’s incorrect. How can you make this equation correct by adding a single straight line? Have a go now.

For the answer, see page 225.

Did you find a way to correct the equation? Were you surprised that there’s actually more than one way to do it?

That’s the interesting thing about your routine mental patterns. They would have you thinking that there’s only one right answer, and only one optimal way of finding that answer. For any challenge, there are countless possible solutions and paths. If you struggled with this, it’s probably because your mind unconsciously imposed a ‘number-solving pattern’ that had you approaching the task from only one direction. While it would appear to be a mathematical problem, the answer itself is visual. You need to shift your mental focus away from the figures to look at the problem as a whole, and then you can see the answer/s.

The message is clear – if we want to become wow-the-world innovative, we sometimes have to interrupt our patterns or even go against them completely. In creative terms, too much routine amounts to insanity, which has been memorably defined as ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’. As our work climate changes rapidly and we stumble upon new kinds of challenges, we need our thinking to become more switched on and proactive so that we can seek out different ways to get results. Thus, the real skill to creativity is being able to think with purpose.

Metacognition

Metacognition plays a governing role in creating successful innovation. This is commonly understood to mean the act of ‘thinking about thinking’, but it goes far beyond this. Metacognition is the ability to control one’s cognitive processes and has been linked in several studies to intelligence (Borkowski, Carr and Pressely, 1987; Brown, 1987; Sternberg, 1984, 1986a, 1986b). According to Sternberg (1986b: 24), the underlying purpose of metacognition is ‘figuring out how to do a particular task or set of tasks, and then making sure that the task or set of tasks are done correctly’. These executive processes involve planning, evaluating and monitoring problem-solving actions. Sternberg suggests that the ability to self-regulate cognitive resources, such as deciding how and when a task should be accomplished, is key to intelligence (Hendrick, 2014).

Thus, more than anything, metacognition is the act of applying a strategy around your thinking to get the results you want (Griffiths and Costi, 2011). In this sense, it represents the highest order of thinking possible. The following are questions that I often pose to my audiences during workshops or conferences. What would your answer be to each one?

• Q. Do you think about your diet?
• Q. Do you think about your fitness?
• Q. Do you think about your appearance?
• Q. Do you think about your thinking?

If you’re like most people, your answer to the first three questions is likely to be an immediate ‘Yes’. It’s only when we reach the last question that the response is apt to be quite different! At best, the answer is ‘Sometimes’. More often than not, it’s a flat ‘No’. This is precisely the problem – we rarely, if ever, think about our thinking.

When it comes to different areas of your life such as your health and appearance, you probably put in place strategies and processes to manage them. For instance, you might design a meal plan or exercise programme to help you reach your ideal weight and fitness level. But I would stake a decent-sized bet that you hardly ever do the same with your mind. Surely it makes sense to manage your thinking just as you would other areas of your life. Applying a strategy is key to overcoming your natural, automatic tende...