Strategies for Creative Thinking

Research on characteristics of creative people has revealed that there are certain attitudes, dispositions, and skills which facilitate creative thinking. Here are some strategies to help you enhance your creative thinking abilities and skills.

• Become more aware and sensitive to be able to notice and respond to feelings, sights, sounds, textures around you. Spot problems, missing information, anomalies, gaps, deficiencies, and so on. Try to notice contradictions and incompleteness in situations that others may not do. For this, cultivate the habit of wider reading, exposure to a variety of information, and develop the art of asking questions, pondering over the mysteries of situations and objects.
• Generate as many ideas, responses, solutions or suggestions on a given task or situation to increase your flow of thoughts. Try deliberately to look for multiple angles of a task and situation to increase flexibility in your thinking. It could be, for example, thinking of alternative arrangements of furniture in a room to generate more space, different ways of conversing with people, looking for costs and benefits of a course of study or career, looking for ways of dealing with an angry friend, helping others, etc.
• Brainstorming technique can be used to increase fluency and flexibility of ideas to open-ended situations. Brainstorming is based on the principle that producing ideas should be kept separate from the evaluation of their worth. The basic assumption is to let the minds think freely and the tendency to put judgment on the worth of ideas may be postponed, i.e. imagination should be given priority over judgment till all the ideas are exhausted. This helps in increasing the fluency of ideas and piling up alternatives. Brainstorming can be practised by playing brainstorming games with family members and friends keeping its principles in mind. Use of checklists and questions often provide a new twist for ideas like, What other changes? What else? In how many ways could it be done? What could be the other uses of this object? and so on.
• Originality can be developed by practicing fluency, flexibility, habit of associative thinking, exploring linkages, and fusing distinct or remote ideas. A creative thinker, it is said, may not evolve new ideas but evolve new combination of ideas. It is the chain of thoughts and cross-fertilisation of ideas that may bring out something new. The idea of the ‘rocking chair’ has come from the combination of ‘chair’ and ‘seesaw’. Practice making unusual and unexpected associations using analogies. Sometimes finding original ideas/solutions requires a dramatic shift of focus which can be facilitated by asking oneself : what is the opposite of the commonplace or usual solution to the problem? Allow conflicting thoughts to co-exist. Looking for solutions opposite to the obvious may lead to original solutions.
• Engage yourself more frequently in activities which require use of imagination and original thinking rather than routine work according to your interest and hobbies. It may be decorating the house, improvising or redesigning of old objects, making use of waste products in multiple ways, completing incomplete ideas in unique ways, giving new twist to stories or poems, developing riddles, puzzles, solving mysteries and so on.
• Never accept the first idea or solution. Many ideas die because we reject them thinking that the idea might be a silly idea. You have to first generate a number of possible ideas or solutions, then select the best from among them.
• Get a feedback on the solutions you decide on from others who are less personally involved in the task.
• Try to think of what solutions someone else may offer for your problems.
• Give your ideas the chance to incubate. Allowing time for incubation between production of ideas and the stage of evaluation of ideas, may bring in the ‘Aha!’ experience. Sometimes ideas cluster like branches of a tree. It is useful to diagram your thinking so that you can follow each possible branch to its completion.
• Resist the temptation for immediate reward and success and cope with the frustration and failure. Encourage self evaluation.
• Develop independent thinking in making judgments, figuring out things without any help or resources.
• Visualize causes and consequences and think ahead, predicting things that have never happened, like, suppose the time starts moving backwards, what would happen?, If we had no zero?, etc.
• Be aware of your own defenses concerning the problem. When we feel threatened by a problem we are less likely to think of creative ideas.
• Last but not the least, be self-confident and positive. Never undermine your creative potential. Experience the joy of your creation.