Improving Your Creative Thinking

A long article for you here. More of a resource for the future then something to scan quickly...

How can you improve your creative thinking?

I've been running a lot of creative thinking ?? workshops recently. There seems never to be a shortage of problems to solve, and as we now work together to establish better way of working, our ability to solve problems as a collective is as important as it's ever been.

Here I want to help you improve your problem solving: both individually and as a team, and I hope the insights here will help you improve your abilty to solve problems, think differently and get more from your creative bain.

The best way to begin is to break problem-solving into a process.

The Creative Process

Reframe the problem > Generate ideas > Consolidate ideas > Implement

I'll go through each step here, but I'll be focusing on idea generation. I've created other resources for the other stages, and will point you to these where relevant.

To make this all as applicable as possible, think of a problem or challenge you'd like to work through. A challenge at work, or a problem you'd like to solve in your personal life. For example:

• How can I improve a particular process? 
• How can I get better at 'X? 
• How can we collaborate better as a team? 
• How can I regain my work-life balance? 
• How can I make more time for 'X? 
• How can I improve my focus?...

STEP 1: Reframe the problem (First ask questions!)

This first step is critical but is often overlooked. Before you begin solving the problem (brainstorming solutions and other ideas), you need to spend sufficient time examing the true nature of the problem.

The most effective ways to do this is to start by asking questions:

• How do you know it's a problem? 
• How will you know when you've solved it? 
• What would the benefits be? 
• What's stopping you? 
• How important is this to you?...

Questions like this help you challenge your assumptions, examine what you think you know, and gain a deeper understanding of the nature of the problem. This help you reframe the problem and see it in a new light.

Einstein said, 'If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask', so spend sufficient time on this step. I've created another post and video on reframing problems in this way, and I recommend reading this first.

STEP 2: Generate Ideas (Brainstorm like a pro!)

Now that you have a better understanding of your problem, you need to brainstorm solutions.

When you want to generate ideas, you use a particular type of creative thinking called divergent thinking. This process involves using lateral thinking strategies to create multiple options or potential solutions, and good examples of this type of creativity include brainstorming and mind mapping.

To increase your familiarity with this type of creative thinking, spend the next three minutes writing down as many ways you can think of to use a paperclip. Be as creative and ridiculous as you like...

How many uses can you think up? Five? Maybe ten? You may have noticed that it's hard to think of that many initially, but soon your brain 'loosens up' and starts to think more laterally, coming up with ever more bizarre and tangential uses for a paperclip.

Idea generation indeed benefits from having time, but researchers have found several other ways to increase your divergent thinking skills and have more productive brainstorming sessions.

Below are my top tips, presented in an order that I feel makes the most sense: considering your environment, your mindset and principles for success, and then specific techniques or strategies that, if used, should make your next brainstorm dramatically more fruitful.

Remember Einstein's wisdom here: 'Creativity is intelligence having fun.'

How to brainstorm like a pro:

Prime your brain

• Sleep, nutrition, movement: Do your best to ensure your brain has had at least 7 hours sleep, has enjoyed some brain-friendly food, is well hydrated and ideally, you've done some light exercise. These 'brain fitness' factors will ensure your brain is ready for optimal performance.
• Create a positive mood: Divergent thinking is improved with feelings of well-being, optimism, and even joy.
• Eliminate distractions: Turn all your notifications off, and ideally get your distracting devices out of reach.
• Prime your brain(s): Doing an unrelated 'alternate uses task' (such as the exercise above – potential uses for a paperclip) prepares your brain to shift into a more lateral way of thinking.

Establish a conducive environment

• Create a tolerant environment. If you're working as a group, make sure people feel permission to express themselves freely. Be patient and encourage autonomy.
• Go somewhere different / change your environment: Move to another room or leave your office/home and go somewhere else entirely. You could even go to the pub as we do tend to be more creative after a couple of drinks. Simply getting up from your desk may be all it takes for you to see a problem from a different angle. 

Apply the principles for success

• Go for quantity: At the early stages of the process, all ideas are good ideas. So you want to cast the net far and wide to capture the greatest range of ideas possible. The point is to generate quantity, and from that comes quality.
• Go for originality too: Focusing on novelty and variety will help increase the number of ideas you likely come up with.
• Defer all judgment: Remove any 'filters' and try to think unrestrictedly. People often keep their 'silly' ideas to themselves when it's the silly ones that are often the best. Don't moderate your ideas at this stage.

Shift your perspective

• Shift your perceptual position

If you want to train your brain to become more lateral, the trick here is to shift your perspective or 'perceptual position’. This means you need to try to see the world (or the problem you’re working on) from someone else’s perspective. This can be particularly helpful when thinking creatively about business strategy: What would your customers think? How would your employees feel? View your problem through the eyes of others, and you may discover a perspective you would otherwise have missed.

As the philosopher, Alain de Botton notes: “The chief enemy of good decisions is a lack of sufficient perspectives on a problem.” Take as many different perspectives as you can, and you will notice it will significantly help you become more creative when generating ideas.

I’ve written another post about shifting your perspective here

• Shift your time frame

Examine your problem from a future orientation: imagine it’s now one year from now – or ten years from now. How does that change your view of the problem and potential avenues towards solutions?

Collaborate

• Work with others (where possible): Different perspectives will always help increase the number of potential ideas, so be sure to ask others and collaborate.
• Work independently, then combine your ideas: When you work as a team, research suggests individuals should brainstorm alone and then combine all of their ideas. This approach results in a more significant number of total thoughts, which at this stage is what you want.

Disrupt your thinking patterns

• Challenge your assumptions: Always examine and challenge what assumptions you may be making about the problem or potential solutions. All too often, we limit our scope for thinking based on previous experience.
• Adopt a 'counterfactual mindset': Your brain has a fantastic ability to imagine 'what if?'. Entertain what might be rather than what is to help challenge your current reality.
• Think in reverse: Turn the exercise on its head and spend time brainstorming how you could make the problem or situation worse. Also called reverse brainstorming, this can spark new ways of thinking. Then reverse all these 'bad' ideas and you may strike gold.
• Think in metaphors: Find a suitable metaphor for your problem and use that as a catalyst for new idea generation. For example, if your problem was 'How can I increase sales?', you could use a metaphor for improving your physical fitness. If you were to brainstorm this challenge you may come up with: exercise more regularly, engage in strength training, get a fitness coach, improve your nutrition, etc. Your job would then be to see how these solutions might relate to your original problem. For example:

Exercise more regularly = Make more sales calls / Strength training = Sales training / Get a personal trainer = Employ a sales coach / Improve your nutrition = Improve your sales materials

• Use different media: A generalised approach to improving divergent thinking is to disrupt current thinking patterns, and you can facilitate this by using other media. For example, if your brainstorming on paper, shift to laptops. If you're capturing ideas digitally, start using post-its.
• Go for a walk: Researchers from Stanford University found that people generated 50% more ideas after a walk. This research makes a case for walking meetings and getting out of the office.

Connect the unconnected

• Combine your ideas: Combine ideas you've already generated, make connections between themes and specific ideas and see what new avenues it invites.
• Use random inputs: Choose a word from the dictionary, select a random object, and look for novel connections to your problem. Then, consider how you might use these connections to solve the problem or provide fresh ideas of ways of thinking.

'RAISE' existing solutions.

Use the acronym 'RAISE' to modify existing solutions or ideas:

• Rearrange: what can be rearranged or re-ordered to solve the problem?
• Adapt: how can you adapt something you're already doing?
• Improve: what processes or methods can you improve or modify to solve the problem?
• Substitute: what are some substitutes or alternatives to existing solutions?
• Eliminate: What can be eliminated?

STEP 3: Consolidate your ideas (Give your brain downtime!)

Once you've generated an exhaustive list of ideas, you'll need to process them – find themes, notice relationships, and ultimately make some decisions. For this, your brain needs downtime, space and perspective. As reluctant as you may be, you now need to stop and move away from the problem. Try to see this step as an entirely different stage, one for which you will need different mental resources.

Have a break, go for a walk, or better still, sleep on it. Your brain is particularly good at forming an association and making sense of things while you sleep. When you return, you will see your ideas with a fresh perspective and more significant insights.

This is a topic of such importance I've written an entire article on it, and created a video, so if you've not already done so, watch that now: How to have more creative insights.

STEP 4: Implement (Test and iterate!)

The final step in the creative process has to be implementation. Put your ideas into action and be willing to test and iterate over time. This will mean failing and making mistakes. Think like a scientist: have a hypothesis and experiment with it. See what works and what doesn't. The creative mindset isn't only about openness to new ideas and experiences - it also required a willingness to fail and try again.

You may find another article I've written helpful for this step: How to turn your goals into processes.

Last word

A long article for sure (congratulations if you made it this far), and I hope you've found it useful. You and your brain are naturally creative. By following some of the suggestions here, I hope you soon notice how much more creative you can be, and how this helps improve your problem-solving on multiple levels.

Any tips you can share with me, I'd love to hear from you.

Phil

I help teams improve their performance and productivity, develop their creative thinking and build their resilience through the application of neuroscience and psychological research.