2. Focus your creative energies on just a few topic areas that you genuinely care about and work on these purposefully
for several weeks or months.
3. Avoid being too narrow in the way you define your problem or topic area; purposefully try broader definitions
and see what insights you gain.
4. Try to come up with original and useful ideas by making novel associations among what you already know.
5. When you need creative ideas, remember: attention, escape, and movement.
6. Pause and carefully examine ideas that make you laugh the first time you hear them.
7. Recognize that your streams of thought and patterns of judgment are not inherently right or wrong; they are
just what you think now based primarily on patterns from your past.
8. Make a deliberate effort to harvest, develop, and implement at least a few of the ideas you generate.
The Heuristics Further Explained....
#1 Make it a habit to purposefully pause and notice things.
The first
heuristic suggests that we make it a habit to purposefully pause and notice things because we know that our automatic perception
processes miss a great deal of what goes on around us. The importance of learning to perceive the world in a fresh way is
clearly a part of the generally accepted theory of creative thinking. If creative thinking is the novel association of existing
concepts in memory, then it follows naturally that it is useful to create a storehouse of concepts. When you pause and notice,
you are not looking for anything in particular. You do not need to know how you are going to use the information. You are
simply storing up concepts (de Bono, 1992).
#2 Focus your creative energies on just a few topic areas that you genuinely care about and work
on these purposefully for several weeks or months.
The second heuristic -- focus, care and work purposefully -- is based on the research into the lives
of great creators. Creative ideas rarely come "all of a sudden." Good creators work diligently with many ideas, in a specific
topic area, over an extended period of time. (For more about the research into creative lives, see Wallace and Gruber, 1989;
Shekerjian, 1990; and Weisberg, 1993.)
#3 Avoid being too narrow in the way you define your problem or topic area; purposefully
try broader definitions and see what insights you gain. Heuristic number three -- define the topic broadly --
encourages us to maintain maximum space for creative maneuvering. Nadler and Hibino (1994) give a concrete illustration of
this heuristic in their "case of the slippery packing crates." The case involves a national manufacturer of consumer goods
that was about to make a multi-million dollar investment in loading dock automation to eliminate the problem of damaged crates.
A young staff engineer saved the company a great deal of money and effort by suggesting a broader view of the topic. While
the immediate need seemed to be for creative ideas in the narrowly focused area of eliminating damage to crates, a broader
statement of the issue was to find creative ways to distribute the company's goods to the marketplace undamaged. This broader
statement of the creative focus lead to major restructuring of the company's warehousing network. This creative approach reduced
the number of handling points; both reducing shipping damage and lowering costs.
#4 Try to come up with original and useful ideas by making novel associations among
what you already know.
The fourth heuristic -- make mental associations -- reminds us to take the basic mental action
that underlies all creative thought. (See, for example, Koestler, 1964.) The zip-lock storage bag is a good example of association
as creativity. The innovation here was in the association of a zipper from the realm of clothing with a bag from the realm
of food storage. This heuristic represents an essential attitude for the creative person. The creative person knows that there
are an infinite number of ideas "out there," because there are so many possible permutations among known concepts. The creative
person never feels defeated, or at the end of the road of ideas. There is always another idea to be had by combining something
that has not been combined before. All that is required is flexibility and the perseverance to keep on trying.
#5 When you need creative ideas, remember: attention, escape, and movement.
The
fifth heuristic -- attention, escape, and movement -- further directs our basic mental mechanics. These three mental activities
underlie all tools for directed creativity. When you need to be creative, pay attention to things in new ways, escape your
current mental patterns associated with the topic, and keep moving in your thinking to avoid premature judgment and the "way
we've always done it" thinking.
#6 Pause and carefully examine ideas that make you laugh the first time you hear them.
Heuristic
number six encourages us to pause on ideas that make us laugh. Though we are not yet sure, it appears that laughter might
be a physiological reaction to a novel connection among neurons in the brain. This explains why we laugh at jokes (the punch
line makes a connection we were not expecting) and smile when we finally figure something out. The "pause on ideas that make
you laugh" heuristic calls us to resist the urge to move on when someone suggests a laughable concept. Working with such ideas
can be one of the most productive things we can do when we desire innovation. In DirectedCreativity, laughter is serious business.
#7 Recognize that your streams of thought and patterns of judgment are not inherently right or wrong; they are just
what you think now based primarily on patterns from your past.
The seventh heuristic in the set -- your judgments
are not inherently right or wrong -- reminds us that our mental processes of judgment are emotion-laden. This heuristic calls
us to keep an open mind and cultivate flexibility; essential ingredients in creative thinking. Of course there are moral and
theological absolute truths; but we are not talking about that here. We are talking about business problems... whether a computer
has to have a keyboard... whether a bank has to have a building. The vast majority of what we do in business and daily work
has nothing to do with absolute truth. But so many of us act as if it does!
#8 Make a deliberate effort to harvest, develop, and implement at least a few of the
ideas you generate.
The last basic heuristic -- implement a few ideas -- is based on the important distinction between
mere creativity and productive innovation. The true innovator is action-oriented in her approach to things. In business, creative
ideas have little real value until someone puts them into action. Have you ever seen a product or service offered in the marketplace
and thought to yourself, "Hey, I thought of that once before"? How many potential millionaires are there in the world who
missed out because they did not act on their creative ideas? How many companies have missed the chance to lead the market?
No Special "Gift" Required
These eight basic rules of thumb can be practiced by anyone. No special "gift" or "creative talent"
is needed. The basic heuristics of DirectedCreativity lead to productive expertise. While using the heuristics of DirectedCreativity
is no guarantee of success, knowing such heuristics shortens the learning curve and raises the chances of success.
