Creative thinking techniques

Madugundu Krishna April 30, 2011

Creative thinking involves two basic processes: escape and provocation.

To escape, you must:

*Recognize dominant polarizing ideas;

*Deliberately search for alternative ways of looking at or doing things;

*Refuse to accept any assumptions r to take anything for granted;

*Ignore all existing concepts;

*Attack, your own and others’ arrogance;

*Realize that there are other ways of looking at things, which are concealed beneath the current way of looking at things;

*Recognize the need to enlarge the Problem concept and place attention on other areas;

*Recognize the danger of the thought processing blocked by adequate ideas, which prevent the development of better ideas.

To be provocative, you will need to:

*Separate the generation of ideas from the judgment and evaluation of those ideas;

*Consider an idea to see where it can lead and what other ideas it can trigger off, rather than to see if it is correct;

*Make unjustified leaps and then to see if it is correct;

*Be wrong at some stages of process in order to be right at the end;

*Accept the fact that there may be no reason to say something until it is said-justify change only after change has occurred;

*Use hindsight to justify an idea;

*Use chance to create discontinuity.

*Move for the sake of movement-create a direction, do not follow one.

To think creatively, you will need to develop an attitude of averseness, learn some simple techniques and skills, and learn to ignore the yes/ no concept.

Attitude of awareness

Awareness is about realizing the danger of being trapped by a fixed way of looking at things and of accepting the confines of an existing concept. It is about realizing that there are two stages to the thinking process, logic and reactivity, and that the two have different uses. Awareness will ensure that adequacy does not prevent the introduction of a better idea.

Techniques and skills

The techniques and skills of creative thinking can be learned even if the thinker does not accept the principles on which they are based. Techniques are merely the formal setting that encourages the use of creative thinking. Skills in creative thinking, like any other skill, come with the practices of techniques.

Even if the techniques, once explained, are never used, an awareness of the principles involved can help the thinker to see the dangers of fixed ideas and the need to develop new ones.

The techniques employed, once the right attitude of awareness is engendered, are:

*Recognition and categorization of current ideas,

*Changing ideas by avoidance,

*C hanging ideas from within,

*Changing ideas from without,

*Negation of the concept of judgment and evaluation.