Creative thinking

Creative thinking produces ideas that are novel and original and also appropriate or useful. A strange idea that serves no purpose is not creative; a new design for a school bag that spreads the weight better is.

Creativity is not only for famous scientists and artists. Everyday creativity is the ordinary inventiveness everyone shows, such as finding a clever way to fix a broken zip. Special-talent creativity is shown by people with exceptional gifts who produce truly new work, like a great composer or inventor. Everyone has the potential to be creative.

Jerome Bruner described a creative product as one that produces effective surprise: it is new enough to surprise us, and right enough to work.

J. P. Guilford described two kinds of thinking:

• Convergent thinking narrows down to one correct answer, as when you solve a sum or answer 'What is the capital of Rajasthan?'
• Divergent thinking opens out to many possible answers, as when you list all the ways a newspaper could be reused. It is used for open-ended questions and is central to creativity.

Divergent thinking abilities:

• Fluency: producing many ideas.
• Flexibility: producing a variety of ideas, of different kinds.
• Originality: producing unusual, new ideas that few others think of.
• Elaboration: filling in details and working an idea out fully.

Edward de Bono suggested lateral thinking: looking at a problem from new angles rather than pushing forward along the usual line.

The creative process usually has four stages:

• Preparation: understanding the problem and gathering information. Creativity often starts with a need.
• Incubation: a period when you seem stuck and may put the problem aside. The mind keeps working on it below awareness.
• Illumination: the sudden 'Aha!' moment when the solution appears, often when you are doing something else.
• Verification: testing whether the idea really works and refining it.

Strategies for creative thinking:

• Be sensitive and curious about your surroundings; notice problems others overlook.
• Produce as many ideas as you can, of different kinds, and look at problems from several angles.
• Brainstorming (Alex Osborn): in a group or alone, produce ideas freely and do not judge them while producing them; evaluation comes later. Judging too early stops new ideas.
• Use checklists of questions (what can be added, removed, combined or used differently?) to prompt new ideas.