This Thinking Method Can Train Anyone (Anyone!) To Be Creative, Scientists Say

Illustration 57101927 © Esignn | Dreamstime.com

People know how to be creative—they’ve just forgotten how.

Researchers at Ohio State University have returned to an innate technique of children to develop a thinking method they claim can teach anyone to be creative. Its basis is pretty simple: It challenges the thinker to dream up alternative worlds and perspectives, where they’ll be able to dig up unexpected plots and solutions.

“We as a society radically undervalue the creativity of kids and many others because we are obsessed with the idea that some people are more creative than others,” details English professor Angus Fletcher, who created the technique. “But the reality is that we’re just not training creativity in the right way.” Fletcher founded the Project Narrative program in the university to study this thinking style.

The narrative theory involves building new worlds in the mind. One example could be to prompt employees to think about their most unusual customer—“then imagine a world in which all their customers were like that. How would that change their business? What would they have to do to survive?”

It borrows some techniques used by children and writers. Fletcher says young children tend to be pretty astute at this, and are thus more imaginative creative than adults, as they are taught to nurture their creativity through storytelling.

However, this ability weakens over time as lessons take on a more logical, semantic, and memory-based nature.

An extension of this training is perspective-shifting, in which employees are challenged to solve a problem by handling it like another colleague.

Although Fletcher’s approach has only recently been outlined in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, the team has successfully taught it to members of the US Army Command and General Staff College, as well as staff members and students of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, the Ohio State College of Engineering, and Fortune 50 companies.

The technique bears a few similarities with a creativity training method called divergent thinking, where students are tasked to think up as many solutions to a problem as possible. However, “what [the old technique] can’t do is help prepare people for new challenges that we know little about today,” notes Fletcher. “It can’t come up with truly original actions. But the human brain’s narrative machinery can.”

It’s not so much about anticipating new outcomes as it is about preparing to encounter unknown experiences. “Creativity isn’t about guessing the future correctly. It’s about making yourself open to imagining radically different possibilities,” Fletcher elaborates.

“When you do that, you can respond more quickly and nimbly to the changes that do occur.”

[via Neuroscience News and Ohio State University, cover illustration 57101927 © Esignn | Dreamstime.com]