Creative Thinking
Farming in his native Berkshire in the early eighteenth century, the British agriculturalist, Jethro Tull, developed a drill enabling seeds to be sown mechanically, and so spaced that cultivation between rows was possible in the growth period. Tull was an organist, and it was the principle of the organ that gave him his new idea. What he was doing, in effect, was to transfer the technical means of achieving a practical purpose from one field to another.
The essential ingredients of the story are as follows. Tull was confronted with a problem and dissatisfied with the existing solutions to it. Suddenly a spark jumped between the problem and his knowledge of another technology. He found a model or analogy. Then it was a question of applying the principle and developing the technology to the new task in hand. The less obvious the connection between the two fields the more we are likely to call it creative thinking. Therefore it is not surprising that inventors and other creative thinkers have knowledge in more than one field. They may even work in a quite different sphere from the one in which they make their names as discoverers or inventors.
The lack of expert or specialized knowledge in a given field is no bar to being able to make a creative contribution. Indeed, too much knowledge may be a disadvantage. As Disraeli said, we must ‘learn to unlearn’. Sir Barnes Wallis, the British aeronautical engineer who helped to develop the Concorde supersonic airliner and the swing-wing aircraft, failed his London matriculation examination at the age of 16. ‘I knew nothing,’ he said in a television interview, ‘except how to think, how to grapple with a problem and then go on grappling with it until you had solved it.’ When you are grappling with a problem remember to widen your span of relevance. Look at the technologies available in fields other than your own, possibly in those that may appear to others to be so far removed as to be irrelevant. They may give you a clue.
The importance of creative thinking today needs no emphasis. In your profession or sphere of work you will have a competitive advantage if you develop your ability to come up with new ideas. In your personal life too creative thinking can lead you into new paths of creative activity. It can enrich your life - though not always in the way you expect. Your task as a creative thinker is to combine ideas or elements that already exist. If the result is an unlikely but valuable combination of ideas or things that hitherto were not thought to be linked, then you will be seen as a creative thinker. You will have added value to the synthesis, for a whole is more than the sum of its parts.
John Adair stated in his book "The Art of Creative Thinking" that our creative imagination must have something to work on. we do not form new ideas out of nothing. The raw materials are all there. The creative mind sees possibilities in them or connections that are invisible to less creative minds. You will be creative when you start seeing or making connections between ideas that appear to others to be far apart: the wider the opponent distance the greater the degree of creative thinking involved. When you are thinking you are travelling mentally, you're on a journey. For genuine thinking is always a process possessing direction. Look out for the unexpected thoughts, however lightly they stir in your mind. sometimes an unsuspected path or byway of thought that opens up might be more rewarding than following the fixed route you had set yourself.
In conclusion, creative thinking often involves a leap in the dark. You are looking for something new. by definition, if it is really novel, neither you or anyone else will have had that idea. often you cannot get there in one jump. if you can hit upon an analogy of what the unknown idea maybe like you are halfway there. For me, my approach to writing is as a result of creative thinking :)) Steve Jobs said " Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people."
I will next share on creative problem solving.
Exercise
Imagine for a moment that an unknown animal had been discovered deep in the jungles of South America. It is destined to replace the dog and the cat popularity as a domestic pet during this century.
What does it look like?
What are it's winning characteristics?
Take some paper and draw it, making some notes about your sketch.