Unlocking the Power of Creative Thinking

Start your week on a positive note with this Newsletter ???

Every week, I carefully curate inspiring articles and share my thoughts, accompanied by motivational quotes. I hope you enjoy this next edition of my Monday Motivation, and I look forward to hearing your feedback and suggestions for future topics.??

Today, I wanted to share something?that?I'm?sure?is?relevant for?all of?you.?If you're like me, you use ChatGPT regularly and are intrigued by the possibilities it offers.?In addition, it doesn't take long to start considering what this might mean for?us, our profession, and, frankly, the world we live in. The World Economic Forum, McKinsey, and nearly every major think tank seem aligned around this hypothesis: The future of work is the conviction that our jobs will become increasingly creative.?

Many companies now include creativity as a core competency for employees at all levels, especially those on the front lines. This applies across all functions, from sales and marketing to accounting and operations to customer service.??So, today's article,?Cultivating the Four Kinds of Creativity ,?focuses on how we can prepare ourselves for this challenge and provide us with a framework?for thinking about creativity.?In this article, the authors offer a typology that breaks creative thinking into four types: integration, or showing that two things that appear different are the same; splitting, or seeing how things that look the same are actually different or more usefully divided into parts; figure-ground reversal, or realizing that what is crucial is not in the foreground but in the background; and distal thinking, which involves imagining things that are very different from the here and now.?

Integration.??

Integration may be local—stitching together a few concepts—or sweeping: a grand unifying theory. How does this show up in our everyday life??Consider the Apple iPhone. Its designers’ success lay in recognizing that when tools such as cameras, phones, and music players are digitized, they are all capturing, storing, retrieving, and transmitting data in the same way, through semiconductors and liquid crystal displays; therefore, they could be combined in a single device—perhaps the most powerful tool now at our disposal. Four decades ago, the phone hanging on your wall had nothing to do with the boom box sitting on your console or the camera filled with film you’d soon drop off for developing.?

Splitting.?

The opposite kind of creative thinking is splitting.?Medical breakthroughs regularly result from the separation of what was thought to be a single disease into several, each of which can be more precisely treated. One of the greatest manufacturing innovations of all time—the assembly line—involved splitting. Before the Industrial Revolution, one craftsperson might oversee the production of a good from start to finish. How might this concept manifest in the context of Revolution 4.0??

Figure-Ground Reversal.?

The term “figure-ground reversal” comes from the study of vision and refers to our ability to shift focus from the foreground to the background to produce a radically different picture. The well-known black-and-white silhouette of two faces in profile—or a vase in the middle—demonstrates how our minds can toggle back and forth between the two.?In 1957, when the Soviet space program launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit Earth, the U.S. military used two widely separated points on Earth to track Sputnik’s speed and position by means of the Doppler effect. However, it wasn’t until 1958 that the far more profound application of the technology became clear for the exact opposite purpose: using points in space to track objects on Earth. In that year the Advanced Research Projects Agency developed Transit to calculate the position and speed of any moving object using two widely separated satellites in space. Today we know this technology as the Global Positioning System, or GPS.?

Distal Thinking.?

Finally, distal thinking involves imagining things as very different from the present. Distal innovators bridge the gap between the present and the future in one of two ways. The first way is by accelerating market maturity through promotions, partnerships, and focused launches.?A second way distal innovators help their radical vision ultimately become reality is with “backward” innovation—developing intermediary technologies that are immediately marketable and will move stakeholders along the maturity curve toward readiness for the actual invention.?

Which type of creativity do you use the most? Each one offers a unique advantage—and potential blind spots. Integrators may try to see synergies where they don’t exist, while splitters may overcomplicate a simple solution. Understanding your strengths as an individual is the first step. Look for places to apply them and watch out for overuse. At your next opportunity to innovate, push yourself to think in the styles that come less naturally to you. Before you settle on a path forward, challenge yourself to define at least one option for each of the four styles. Creativity is an imperative for our new world of work. Cultivating all four types of divergent thinking at every level will afford greater odds of converting each new challenge into successful innovation.?

Stay on the beat with me and have an amazing start to your week ???

Yours,??

Mark?

Source?

Kellerman, G. R. (12. December 2022). Cultivating the Four Kinds of Creativity. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2023/01/cultivating-the-four-kinds-of-creativity ?

?