Are You Thinking all Wrong?

If you want to be a creative thinker make sure you are doing the right type of thinking at the right time. Stop making the classic mistake of mixing your thinking process which strangles your creativity.

Imagine you’ve been called into a brainstorming session, there are flipcharts all over the room and everyone is excited to take part.

So far, so good. You may even have had the talk about all ideas being valid - there is no such thing as a bad idea… again a good job of setting the scene.  Then whoever is running the session asks:

Lets’ have your best ideas

Think outside the box

And this is where it all goes downhill!  To understand how we need to look at two distinct ways we think:

One is divergent thinking - using a stimulus to think of many possible outcomes. This is sometimes referred to as creative thinking, which is generally a non-linear process and the thinking can be both emergent and lateral in nature.

Then there is convergent thinking - using many stimuli to arrive at an outcome. This is sometimes referred to as critical, or focused, thinking. This type of thinking emphasises the need to boil down to one correct answer, it is basically the opposite of convergent thinking.

Our brain is an amazing thing; however, it cannot effectively do these two types of thinking at the same time.  If you look at the questions about ‘best ideas,’ or ‘think outside the box,’ you are asking the brain to think convergently and divergently at the same time.

By asking for these ideas, you are effectively asking the brain to (i) think creatively and (ii) critique the ideas, at the same time. This stifles the creative process and encourages convergent thinking, people playing safe with their ideas.

Asking for anything that enables critiquing or assessing of the ideas at the same time as generating them will result in poor brainstorming sessions. If you want to facilitate effective brainstorming sessions, ensure you create an environment that maintains divergent thinking.

Here are tips to run an effective brainstorming session:

1. Be clear at the beginning what the session is about – be focused
2. Be clear about the desire to collect ideas – it’s the number of ideas that is important
3. Ask questions in such a way as they do not require any critiquing
4. Encourage far-fetched ideas
5. Ensure everyone has a voice and can participate
6. Allow building of ideas to create new ideas

Don’t allow criticising or evaluation of any ideas

Once you have run a session and have your ideas, you can then move onto a more focused session. This will enable the team/group to analyse the ideas and start working on their potential and how realistic they are. This session will be utilising focused, or critical, thinking which will ensure it is effective.

Therefore, to be more creative ensure you know the outcomes you are looking for and create the environment that generates the type of thinking you need.