When people
are asked to “think creatively” they quickly get stuck in a rut; the subject
they’re trying to think creatively about constrains their imagination and
consequently their ideas are much less creative than they might otherwise be.
In studies conducted by Thomas Ward at The University of Alabama, participants
were asked to draw animals from an alien planet; nearly all the animals that
people drew resembled animals from our own planet Earth. By thinking of
“animals” they were led down a path of sensory organs, limbs and body shapes
that broadly conformed to their existing experiences.
Your brain
automatically calls up information relevant to what you’re thinking about; even
the act of deciding not to think of
something causes your brain to act against you, providing an image of the
very thing you want to avoid.
Try this - don’t under any circumstances think of an
elephant…
See? You probably now have a picture of an elephant in your head. Even
if you don’t have an accurate memory to recall (say a pink elephant), your brain will usually construct a helpful picture
for you to consider. And that’s not good for creative thinking.
If you want
to change the way you think about a creative problem, then you need to change
what you’re thinking about. You need to frame the problem in a new way so that
your brain pulls different images from your memory helping you to see things
differently. One way to do this is to find the essence of the problem you’re
trying to solve. Had the students in Alabama thought about “life” rather than
“animals” they might have been more creative in their interpretation of the
problem and therefore in the solutions they came up with. If thinking about the
essence of the problem doesn’t generate enough new thinking, try broadening
your thinking even further and see where that takes you. Go wide; maybe “life”
could lead you to “life on Mars”, leads to “Mars Bar” leads to “chocolate” then
to the different states of chocolate (solid or molten) which might lead you to
conceiving animals which have a fluid form depending on their environment…
In the end,
remember that your creative output depends on where you start. So the first
rule for thinking creatively is not to think differently, it’s to think of
different things.
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