Day 21- 23 – Creativity
There are a range of techniques that can be used to help you create something new and valuable.
Distancing is similar to Backward Thinking – a thinking strategy to avoid mental inertia or being locked in one’s logic bubble.
Distancing means that we create deliberately some emotional, psychological and mental distance towards the problem situation or thinking challenge.
There are several ways to distance ourselves.
- Image the problem challenge is not now and here, but somewhere else. For example, in another continent and years ahead.
- Redefine the problem in neutral terms in order to avoid associations to the standard or normal way of seeing things. Using abstract terms, which have no relation to the existing meaning of the word. For example, the problem of wild cats who steal food from the domestic pets could be redefined into a movable object interrupts the properly functioning of another movable object.
- Image how someone else, unrelated to the field, would solve the problem. To enhance their cooperation teams for heart operations consulted on an aircraft carrier, plumbers and a pitch stop teams at car races.
- Image how many little dwarfs would attack the problem.
- Change the dimensions of the problem. What would happen as the length of an object was five times more?
- Identify a reference class of past, similar problem situations or thinking challenges. This is especial fruitful when forecasting or assessing risks. (Reference Class Forecasting)
Using a random object, picture or word is another way to trigger ideas. Also we can introduce randomness in our daily life to break our thinking pattern.
- Visit a museum at random
- Go to a movie theater and watch the movie in the room you have tossed with a die
- Go to a training center, and follow the course which is given on the first floor, second room
- Buy a magazine you would never buy
- Read a different newspaper than you usually read
- Don’t plan your holiday, go with the flow, the weather and your spirit. Don’t make reservations in hotels or camping sites
- Change the way you commute to your work
- Engage in unusual encounters
- Organize a party for not-acquaintances
- Go to that theater you have never been to
- Engage in a conversation with an arbitrary person
- If you have two alternatives, throw a dime to decide what to do
- Eat your lunch with other people than from your department
- Avoid your standard hang-out places
- Buy a book you will never buy for yourself.
- Extend your library size and diversity
Blog posts:
Provoke Randomness as a Thinking Strategy
Thinking Outside the Box
Distancing – A Thinking Strategy
Sunken office
Day 21- 23 – Creativity
Let’s be creative with the word Creativity!
A playful approach is a vital component in creative thinking. Play with the word creativity – choose your own method or combine several approaches. We are referring to a creative approach to thinking rather than creativity in the sense of activities such as painting, or creative flower arrangement.
You can:
- Draw or doodle the word – use pencils, crayons, water color. . .
- Make a list of creative ideas that other people has had and improve upon them.
- Write a song or poem about the word.
- Look up metaphors for the word, such as “thinking outside the box”, and then write your own metaphors
Here is a list of some alternatives to a creative approach to thinking to get you started.
- looking for alternatives
- productive thinking
- breakthrough thinking
- escaping thinking patterns
- thinking differently
- lateral thinking
- radical removal of a contradiction
- innovative thinking
- anticonventional thinking
- disruptive thinking
- putting forward something that not existed before
- non logical thinking (but not illogical)
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