Creative Thinking Tools
Still remember the 4 stages of creative
process?
• In this chapter, you will learn to utilize the creative tools
needed in each stages.
✓ Search for challenges
✓ Express the Problem or Issue
✓ Investigate the problem or issue
✓ Produce Ideas
1. Search for challenges
• Be observant
• Look for the imperfections in things
• Note your own and other’s dissatisfactions
• Search for causes
• Be sensitive to implications recognize the opportunity in
controversy
Be observant
Some people are oblivious of what is going on around them. They are so involved
in their own internal reverie that they miss much of what is happening. Subtle
hints are wasted.
How to start being observant?
✓ Start looking at and listening to people, places and things more closely.
✓Try to pick up details you’d ordinarily miss.
✓See how people behave.
✓Remember to not just be observant about other people, observe yourself as
well.
Look for the imperfection in things
Research suggests that productive thinkers and creative people have a
keen sense of imperfection and that this sense is one of the sources of
their achievement. They recognize that all ideas, systems, processes,
concepts and tools are inventions and therefore open to improvement.
How to look for imperfection?
✓ Creative people go out of their way to find imperfection.
✓ Do reasoning
✓ Colgate story (https://youtu.be/uL_JniYHwoc)
Note your own and other’s
dissatisfaction
✓ Take note of the dissatisfactions you feel.
✓ Instead of surrendering yourself to your own dissatisfaction,
paused and remind yourself that every dissatisfaction is a signal that
some need is not being met.
✓When you converse with other people, listen carefully for their
expressions of dissatisfaction.
Search for causes
The people who make breakthroughs and achieve insights are those
who wonder. Their wondering extends to the causes of things. How they
got to be the way they are and how they work.
✓Be alert to any significant situation or event you cannot explain
satisfactorily.
Be sensitive to implications
Every discovery, every invention, every new perspective or
interpretation makes an impact whose extent is seldom fully realized
at first. Good thinkers usually recognize that impact before others
because they are sensitive to implications.
2. Express the Problem or Issue
✓Distinguishing Problems from issues
✓Guideline for expressing problems and issues
Distinguishing Problems from issues
Problems Issues
A problem is a situation that we regard as An issue is a matter about which intelligent,
unacceptable. informed people disagree to some extent.
Solving problems therefore means deciding Resolving issues means deciding what belief
what action will change the situation for the or viewpoint is the most reasonable.
best.
Example: A student trying to study in a noisy Example: A member of congress proposing a
dormitory. cut in Social Security benefits for the elderly.
Whenever you are uncertain whether to treat a particular challenge as a
problem or an issue, apply this test:
Ask whether the matter involved tends to arouse partisan feelings and to
divide informed, intelligent people. If it does not, treat it as a problem. If it
does, treat it as an issue.
Guidelines for expressing problems
and issues
1. Identify the challenge The moment you are aware that something you have experienced or
read about is bothering you or that you are dissatisfied with some
person, object or situation, examine the situation and raise your
negative feeling to the conscious level. Ask yourself, “What exactly am
I feeling?”.
2. Express the problem or issue Express the problem or issue on paper rather than merely in your
mind. There are 2 main importance for writing your expression.
1. Joining mental and physical effort and externalizing ideas often
help clarify them.
2. The very act of writing an idea has a way of triggering other ideas.
Press yourself to produce as many expressions of the problem or
issue as you can.
3. Refine your expression After you have expressed the problem or issue in as many ways as
you can, refine the expressions. That is, replace vagueness with
exactness and general words with specific ones.
3. Investigate the problem or issue
✓ What to look for?
✓ Maintaining a questioning perspective.
✓ Conducting your own research
What to look for?
✓ Eyewitness Testimony – Eyewitness testimony may or may not be accurate, you should
not accept it at face value. Instead, wherever possible, try to verify it.
✓ Unpublished Report – Reflects real world knowledge. Often they are false. Therefore, it
is prudent to verify the accuracy of unpublished reports before accepting them or
repeating them.
✓ Published Report – Found in books, magazines, professional journals and etc.
✓ Expert Opinion – Much more trustworthy than most other sources.
✓ Experiment – A controlled procedure undertaken to test the validity of a hypothesis, a
statement that predicts or explain phenomena or behavior.
✓ Your personal experience – Among the most vivid information because you know it
intimately.
✓ Statistics – It produces quantified information.
✓ Observational Study – Consists of closely examining an event or activity as it is taking
place for the purpose of understanding it and in some cases, find way to understand it.
Maintaining a questioning perspective
When dealing with published ideas, particularly those of
well-known authorities, you may be tempted to surrender
your judgement. To let that happen is a mistake. Being
human, authorities are subject to making the same errors as
anyone else. They can, for example, be blinded by personal
preferences, cling stubbornly to outmoded views and suffer
lapses in reasoning.
Conducting your own research
• In order for you to solve problem effectively after practicing
the methods suggested in previous slides would be
conducting your own.
4. Produce Ideas
✓Stimulating your imagination
✓Aiming for originality
✓Withholding judgment
✓Overcoming obstacles
Stimulating your imagination
Most people behave unimaginatively not because they lack imagination, but because
they fear the reaction their ideas will receive. It takes more than determination to
stimulate your thoughts, particularly if you have gotten into the habit of suppressing
them.
Follows are 7 effective strategies to activate your imagination:
1. Force uncommon responses
2. Use free association
3. Use analogy
4. Look for unusual combinations
5. Visualize the solution
6. Construct pro and con arguments
7. Construct relevant scenarios
Aiming for originality
• Like every other creative skill, originality can be learned. If you don’t
produce original thoughts, it is only because you have acquired the
habit of being unoriginal.
• To achieve originality in your thinking, demand it of yourself.
• Don’t restrict you ideas to those you have heard or thought of before.
Overcoming Obstacles
• The 3 most common obstacles to the effective production of
a large and varied number of ideas are thinker’s block,
vagueness and confusion. Mastering a few responses can
prevent your problem-solving efforts from being frustrated.
→ Flip to the next page.
Copy your list of ideas
Look back at the ideas you over again and again,
Run through the strategies
have written. Read them concentrating on each
to stimulate your Walk away from the If all fails, go back to the
carefully, concentrating on idea as you are writing it.
imagination again. That is, problem for a time (an earlier stage of the
each as you read it. Be alert to the appearance
force uncommon hour, a day, a week). creative process and
Usually, one of those ideas of a new idea on the
responses, use free Return to it only when you consider other
will suggest another that fringe of your
association and analogy can take a fresh look at it, expressions of the
you have not written. A consciousness. This
and look for unusual unburdened of anxiety. problem or issue.
soon as that happens, approach will keep you
combination.
write the new idea down. active and prevent
frustration.
Want to learn more?
Read this book for
further info
Page 103 – Page 168
