Powerful Creative Thinking?
To me the question, Is Creative Thinking Powerful? is an important one to ask.
When I am explaining the value of Creative Thinking to non-believers I must do it using logic. That is because that is how the non-believers think. Logic is the average person's all-purpose thinking method. Logical Thinking has been around for more than 2400 years. This to me says it is an old-fashioned way of thinking. There is a huge amount of new technology released in just the last 30 years. We use it in our everyday lives.
Think of mobile phones, the internet, apps and so much more. How vastly have these changed our lives for the better. Technology seems to be changing at an ever-increasing pace. Why then do most people ignore the Creative Thinking tools and techniques that have been developed to make life simpler and better. My guess is that there is so much change in the world it is hard to keep up.Edward De Bono coined the term Lateral Thinking in 1967 so it has been with us for around 50 years. De Bono and other creative thinkers have thought about the thinking process to develop a range of simple yet powerful creative thinking tools that we can use today.
A recent International Monetary Fund report says, "One of the reasons why wages growth is weak around the world - including in Australia - is that productivity growth remains poor. If a country increases its productivity, it can afford to give employees a pay rise, and that will happen without a pick-up in inflation. That means employees get a REAL wage rise, not just a nominal one." Creative thinking tools and techniques can help each of us to improve our productivity and with a little luck get a pay rise.
There is a huge range of creative thinking tools all designed for different purposes. Some overlap in their usefulness but on the whole, they can help us to solve many of today's challenges. The reason that creative thinking is so effective is that these techniques were purposely designed to make up for gaps in the logical thinking system. More importantly they give us a wide range of tools to help maximise the thinking power in any room. Logical thinking is bound by the fact that it was designed to weed out the best ideas. This called for critical analysis and judgement as well as comparisons to past ideas.
People using logic became adept at recognising patterns and thus shortening the thinking process by relating to previous experience. This is valuable when doing things like crossing the street as it saves heaps of thinking and time. Patterned thinking has some limitations when we want to come up with original ideas because it is often locking us into old patterns. This is a major block to our creative thinking grossly limiting the process. Many creative thinking tools are designed specifically to provoke us into thinking something different. This provocation is how the creative thinking tools derive huge value as they simplify and speed up the process. More importantly, because there is a wide range of creative thinking tools it is much easier to choose one that is totally fit for the purpose you intend to use it for.
THE AUTOMATION ADVANTAGE report commissioned by Google Australia says, "Tasks requiring creative and complex cognitive thinking will also become more important. In all, Australians will spend on average 2 hours per week more on interpersonal, creative and synthesis tasks; and less time on routine and manual tasks."
The range of creative thinking tools explained on this website are designed to deliver improved productivity to individuals and business alike.
I hope you are able to incorporate some of these techniques to make your work quicker and easier. Until we meet again live large and be safe.
Cheers
Eric Elsley
Creativity - Your Gateway To Working Smarter