Creative thinking is something we all want in our lives, but we often don’t think we are capable of it or that we don’t have the talent for it.
Most people think creative thinking is just not for them, that it’s a mystical magic force and they give up before they’ve even started.
Most people think creativity is a talent you are born with, you’ve either got it or you haven’t, so they don’t even try.
Most people want to be more creative, but their fixed mindset tells them they’re not.
Most people don’t realize that the truth is that you can learn to think creatively and that there are simple methods you can apply to change your mindset and attitude to set your creative mind free.
It’s more of an art than a science, more of a way of being rather than a gift. There are ways to change your attitude towards creativity and creative thinking and problem-solving comes as a free bonus.
It just needs a little patience, persistence, fortitude, and agency.
There are only two things we can really control in our lives; Attitude and Effort.
If you have the right attitude (mindset) and you apply the right kind of effort (applied energy) almost anything is possible.
It will mean moving away from comfort and the status quo, and into uncertain territory, It does mean accepting some risk that you will fail, and it does mean that you have to doubt and question your assumptions and received wisdom.
Shigeo Fukuda
It’s also wrong to view creative thinking as limited to the arts or so-called creative industries. Creative thinking exists in everything we do, from preparing food to making a cross-court return to solving a math problem. It’s how we adapt and solve problems. Creativity, curiosity, and playfulness are natural human qualities. It’s how we’ve evolved and how we adapt to and survive in changing environments. It’s only education that teaches us not to think playfully and creatively.
It’s a question of mindset and of looking at things from different perspectives.
The Neuroscientist, David Eagleman in his book, “The Runaway Species”, crystallized creative thinking into 3 main mental and conceptual approaches; Bending, Breaking and Blending. All of which involve manipulating ideas in order to create new ideas.
Beau Lotto (also a neuroscientist) in his book Deviate, looks at the same process as an interruption of perception by challenging and questioning assumptions and beliefs. He suggests that creativity is always a logical step (similarly to Eagleman he says that we start by working with what we’ve got and what we know) He says we can only move one (logical) step at a time into a space of possibility. If you think about computers and mobile phones, these inventions depended on the invention and development of many other innovations before them in order to be able to come to fruition.
Both concepts make sense but deal with different stages and processes in creative thinking. Lotto’s is early conceptual mindset, about the mechanics of thinking and Eagleman’s, is about the conceptual techniques used for creative and innovative problem-solving.
However, there are 4 slightly different over-arching core skills that are relevant to both and essential for the mindset attitudes required for creative thinking.
M C Escher
1. Future Vision.
We are always faced with a paradox.
On the one hand, we want to and need to, innovate and on the other we want the status quo. Our brains have conflicting needs. We need to conserve mental energy, which we do by developing assumptions, habits, and beliefs, that allow us to think without consciously thinking (and thus save precious mental energy). These help us to develop our attitudes and our behaviors.
However, we have been blessed with an imagination that allows us to be able to imagine a different future scenario. We need to adapt to changing circumstances, and to innovate in order to survive and thrive.
Assumptions allow us to behave in predetermined ways, based on past history and experience. They become our habitual, well-trodden neural pathways. They conserve vital mental energy by using the same familiar, paths again and again. Knowledge of the past and its meaning and relevance allows us to see the current landscape and have the ability to predict what might be next.
Prediction can be a risky business, particularly if our assumptions don’t fit the situation. This is why we constantly redefine “normality” and question our assumptions, in order to find new solutions.
When we combine questioning and doubt with imagination, we create a new future vision. Imagination is the key tool for our minds to carry out what-if scenarios.
Interestingly, memory and prediction use the same neural networks which are also involved in the construction of narratives and images that foster imagination.
Antonio Damasio, another neuroscientist, terms these neural networks as “the playgrounds of creativity”.
We live a great part of our lives in the “anticipated future” rather than the present. We make plans and strategies to achieve a future outcome that is different from the present and over which we have control. This is the reduction of uncertainty.
What-if, is the most important question for a creative mind.
2. Mimicry and Play
One of our essential developmental processes, particularly when we are young, is to mimic our parents and to play.
We use mimicry and play in order to understand the fundamentals and the rules of engagement and behavior.
Playfulness is how we test and experiment with the rules. It’s how we learn. First, we learn the fundamentals and foundations and then run playful “tests”.
We learn, and probably have to master, the basics first before we innovate and change. Creativity without this foundation is impossible because creative thinking needs a starting place in order to be able to affect a change.
Play is both pleasurable and instructive and gives us the boundaries and anchors (on which we can build and change). Fun and playfulness are deeply woven into the creative process.
It’s not just children that need to play. Playfulness allows us to relax with the problem and create different imaginary scenarios without the potential risk involved in untested action.
3. Daydreaming and Mind Wandering.
Nowadays we are bombarded with distractions and we willingly participate because it fills the space of time with activity. We seem to have lost the ability to allow the mind to wander, to drift and to daydream.
Daydreaming, like sleep, is important for the mind to shift and transfer information and to make fresh connections.
Admittedly recent awareness of mindfulness is helping. However, it’s not always about emptying your mind as focussed concentration, particularly in activities, can also produce similar results that mindfulness delivers.
This is the concept of “flow” described by Millay Csikszentmihalyi. Where a level of extreme, relaxed “mindful” concentration can give us a focussed state of mind, where time drifts away and you exist in the moment, that he calls a Flow mindstate.
A wandering mind is the fuel of creative imagination and opens doors to randomness and novelty, breaks our status quo (our assumptions in Beau Lotto’s language) and plays with new paths forward.
Sometimes we need to mentally explore to find out what’s around the next corner in order to reduce uncertainty. This, in turn, allows us to redefine normality and adapt, innovate and evolve.
4. Ambiguity
Injecting ambiguity allows us to re-interpret by looking at more generalized aspects of a problem. Recent studies with architects have shown that novices in the field tend to depend on perceptual relations. They work with what is explicit and is in front of them. Whereas experts in a field tend to see functional relations, they tend to see the relationship between design elements even when they aren’t explicit or obvious.
Creative experts are able to infer more possibilities. The more you can manipulate possibilities the more innovative your solutions will be. The broader your experience, expertise, and foundations, the more possibilities you will have open to you.
However, experience can have the opposite effect of narrowing your field of vision and dependence on tried and tested assumptions, thereby limiting your creative potential.
It all comes back to Attitude and Effort. If you can get your mindset right and apply the appropriate resources, you have a better chance of thinking creatively.
Peter Brookes