Learning to be Creative

Coming up with new ideas can be a way of solving problems that appear intractable. On a personal level, if we could come up with new ways to budget our money, new methods for managing our time and new approaches to improving our relationships, wouldn’t that be great. So, creative thinking is the process for dramatic personal self-improvement. This is a requisite skill that should be fostered and harnessed throughout life.

The process: all you have to do is ‘come up with new ideas’; oh, and then effectively implement these ideas to solve an existing problem, i.e. family finances, or achieve a designated goal, i.e. make more money.

In addition to personal self-improvement, creative thinking can foster professional growth. By pitching new ideas to the boss, your value to the organization will improve. You may decide to take these new ideas to a higher level and start a company. New ideas are the seeds to positive change. Think of the impact that they have. New ideas are how we advance society, how we innovate, make life easier, fuller and more enjoyable.

Easier said, than done.

Are you born with a creative mind? Can you learn to be creative?

Research suggests yes to both. Most would agree that the human brain is highly adaptable, and its abilities and resources can be maximized far beyond what is conventional assumed, particularly at a younger age.

So, it is a “no-brainer” that creative thinking is a buzz word in education and early childhood development. But, our educational system is structured around principles of evaluation and competition, where rewards are given to those observed to successfully manage designated choices in a timely manner. How does this framework allow for creativity to blossom? It simply rewards those that have already reached a functional level of tapping into their own creative process.

Doubly concerning is that this educational framework appears to be somewhat mirrored in the work world, giving merit for having an educational framework that rewards those that operate most effectively under preordained facts and rules. Despite these highly conventional organizations in our society, change and distruption occurs and individuals are recognized for their ability to innovate securing them a path up the corporate ladder.

The development and nurturing of creativity is then left up to the individual, typically one that is out of college and in the early battles of his career. How can you turn yourself into an innovation machine? And collectively, how do we get the educational system to implement strategies for enhancing creative thinking skills early on in development?

First off, do you – on a personal level – or even the greater collective ‘we’ – on a societal/organizational level – really understand how creative thinking works? Can you describe it? Turns out, as research shows, that different cultures define creativity in different ways.

Most of us start to think of some creative genius, an outstanding impactful person, as an example; but then you must ask yourself: how, on earth, can creative thinking be taught? be learned?

I think that it is important to semantically separate the creative part (idea generation) from all other features of getting an idea to market, or having that idea seamlessly introduced in the group homework assignment. That second part is dependent on the gatekeepers (corporate execs, elite academicians, classroom instructors etc.).

How do we learn to pull an idea out-of-the-hat, metaphorically speaking? There are ample resources on the effective utilization of brainstorming in the corporate world. Worth investigating. Likewise, there are problem-solving processes that are also worth implementing.

I recommend performing perceptual exercises. They can be either general or task-specific.

Define, exhaustively, what you see around you. Describe, in excruciating detail, the sounds that you hear. Chronicle your surrounding with as much rich descriptive detail as possible. Be brief, meaning not wordy, but be comprehensive. Record your reports and monitor the degree of elaboration over time. Try to think of your perceptions as all the stuff that you can see, hear, smell, taste and touch – the millions of neural pathways sending information to the brain at any given moment. Then do this for your internal state, including proprioceptive messages, the internally-derived signals (i.e. belly ache) – even with your eyes closed. Give an account of the things that you physically feel, such as temperature, air movement, minor discomforts, breathing, heart beating, slight shifting of your body? What are you visualizing? What emotions are present?

These exercises will help expand your perceptual boundaries.

Erika Fromm, back in the 1950s, described the psychological aspects of imagery as being either bidden or not bidden, meaning internal images that are either voluntarily evoked or appear on their own, respectively. The imagery arising from our unconscious mind was identified by Fromm as being filled with symbolism and insightful impact. Perhaps the very source of all creativity, and an access point of the early therapists to assess mental health. Fromm effectively used hypnosis as a means of accessing the unconscious in her patients. Similarly, Sigmund Freud, the renowned father of psychology, used psychoanalysis, via the patient’s subconscious, to get a glimpse of a person’s unconscious world.

If the premise is, as I see it, that the unconscious mind is the resource of our creativity, then how can we foster our ability to effectively access its treasure trove?

In the formal educational setting, the instructor becomes the lynchpin. The instructor that actively supports a student’s passion to pursue an assignment, for example, is key to enhancing creativity. By encouraging expansion of a thesis project (say, ‘use of sarcasm in social media’) and further dissemination of the output, i.e. paper or presentation, the student is pushed to develop the new idea(s).  Curiosity is indeed a driving force. Yet, to incubate the new idea, welcoming critiques (with the instructor acting as intermediary and mentor) helps refines the new ideas into a more compelling final product. This requires that the instructor not hold the belief that creativity is a gift given by nature to a few geniuses, but rather, that it is process that can be nurtured. Nor should the instructor have the belief that creativity is a personality trait of the socially awkward marginal students that don’t fit in.

All students can learn to effectively access their hidden wealth of new ideas. And it starts with expanding their perceptual boundaries. And it can be task-specific (i.e. thesis topic: ‘use of sarcasm in social media’): have I used sarcasm today? ever? what-when-where-why? out of anger, frustration, humor? response by others? Has someone been sarcastic to me today? ever? what…and so on. The more sophisticated and elaborate the description the better. It is a way for students to master themselves and their environment.

The challenge is to integrate the concepts of creativity into a curriculum that is essentially assignment based, workbook exercises and such. Creativity is more than unrestricted play and artistic expression, although they have a role in fostering an individual’s confidence in their ability to have freer access to their own reservoir of ideas, images and thoughts.

The wellspring of ideas lies in the unconscious, which was considered by the great early psychologists to be in constant conflict with conscious thought. This conflict contributed to psychological maladies. As said, Freud used psychoanalysis and dream analysis to access the unconscious, Fromm hypnosis.

Fromm said that creativity comes from a unique level of awareness and response to the internal discoveries. Adding to this, Edward de Bono, in 1970, called creativity a form of lateral thinking. We can interpret this as a bridge of awareness from our conscious mind to the raucous nature of the generally inaccessible unconscious. Max Wertheimer, co-founder of Gestalt psychology, saw that people have very habitual ways of interpreting the world and their perceptions. He postulated that insightful breakthrough comes from discovering and identifying the structural organization underlying our perceptions. In the unconscious mind there is a deconstruction of thought, that can offer new ways, new approaches, and new perspectives, as the information we access from the unconscious gets interpreted by our conscious minds. Wertheimer called this productive thinking.

Creative thinking is a skill, a learned behavior, whereby one effectively links the conscious thought process to the imagination, a mental place outside of the conventional boundaries of perception, and, in doing so, is able to extract new coherent thought structures that contribute in a novel way. This pertains to a school assignment, a work task, a business solution, or invention of some kind.

The huge body of literature in the field of creativity emphasizes the either the product of outcome (a tangible thing to describe and measure) or the context (also quite tangible). The person (with distinguishing motivations, curiosity and passion) and his environment (fostering parents, spouses and mentors, designated field of study) are unfortunately over-emphasized in the literature. There are good mentors, bad parents, unmotivated students, highly passionate people and those that simply don’t give a hoot. I see that the crux of creativity is that ah-ha moment of self-discovery, of discovering something novel, and that this is a learned ability. It is not something that you can only get from the best universities, great genetic stock, and exceptionally engaging parents.

In the field of creative thinking, we see terms like divergent thinking and convergent thinking. Above I just mentioned the concept of lateral thinking and productive thinking. These terms, I think, do a disservice to our understanding of the creative process. Divergent thinking is a more academic sounding term for the creative part of the equation, the generating of new ideas. The term metaphorical thinking comes up as well since the auditory and visual sensations are typically metaphorical representations of potentially useful ideas. Convergent thinking adds the pedantic notion that one has to critically evaluate whether the potentially wacky idea is viable. Careful examination of an idea involves focusing, refining, prioritizing, and then deciding the best possible solution, given the context of the environment and approval of the audience or stakeholders. After all, it’ll be only deemed creative if it is appropriate. If it is inappropriate, then the sarcastic version applies: “Well, that’s creative ;-)”

Here are three factors to consider in enhancing your creative thinking: your boundary of perception, your access to your imagination, and your verbal ability to describe something.

The third pretty much affects the first two. Think of the imagination as the movie-like experiences that you have as you dream. Dreams are filled with images, sensations, feelings appearing separate or blended together. So, how is your ability to describe your current perceptions or your daydreams? The better that you get at verbally describing these, the more facile you will become at accessing potentially useful data. By developing the habit of describing one’s “daydreams” in elaborate detail, this automatically applies logic and rationality to the seemingly chaotic cascade of images. Interpreting and then reinterpreting them as metaphors further refine the exercise in bringing the world of imagination into the light of reality.

Gary Davis, in 2005, developed sixteen different categories of personality characteristics that are indicative of creativity. For me, four stand out: Capacity for Fantasy, Attracted to Complexity, Being Thorough and Being Highly Perceptive. If you want to be more creative, mimic each one of these characteristics until they are within your control. Donald Treffinger and his coauthors, in the 2000s, emphasized the willingness and ability to listen to one’s inner voice as key to being creative. I think that by enhancing your perceptual acuity of your surroundings, emotions and imagination, the relationship with your inner voice will become more trustful and yield to your volition.

The new ideas that you come up with obviously must be vetted and tested and examined often (i.e. within groups or with mentor/instructor) whether at work or school. So, the creative step is the subtle event that occurs when coming up with something new and is the focus of this post. All other processes are distinct and include social and communication skills, navigating interpersonal dynamics, so that truly reaching a final product has robust consensus and validity.

Resources:

Educating for Creativity and Innovation by Donald Treffinger, Patricia Schoonover and Edwin Selby

The Motivated Brain by Gayle Gregory and Martha Kaufeldt

Creativity and Creative Thinking by Satheesh Gopalan