Some ways to promote creative thinking

Edward de Bono, in his book "The Mechanism of Mind," outlined these techniques to promote creative thinking.

Essentially, he wants us to change the way that we normally look at a problem

Random Input

This seems a bit weird, but it boils down to looking at random words or pictures when you are trying to solve a problem.

So, when looking at the problems faced by a shopper with two small kids, we may randomly choose a word in a dictionary such as "banana".

This may lead us to think about slipping, the difficulty of packaging s=certain items, or distracting the kids with food.

Quota

When you've thought up a solution to your problem, you don't stop. You may be able to think of an even better solution. This is similar to the whole theme of D&T that we should have lots of possible solutions, then experiment and test to come up with the best. If we close too early on one solution we restrict creativity.

Attention to different parts of the problem

If we select one aspect of a problem and think about that for a while allows a different perspective which can give us a solution. One of de Bono's examples: Some employees were impatient waiting for slow elevators in a building. The solution was to install mirrors. The employees became busy looking at themselves in the mirrors and were no longer impatient. This solution came from switching attention from the problem of the slowness of the elevators to the problem of the impatience of the employees.

Cross-fertilization

Allowing ideas to flow back and forth between more than one person. The "team approach" - very similar to the answer proposed for one of our questions in the trial.

Reversal

Thinking of the opposite sometimes gives us interesting ideas: opposite in size, time, direction, meaning, etc; switching the roles of two people or things. In the elevator example above, one might think, "What if we purposely try to make the elevators even slower?" This question might lead, in a roundabout way, to the solution of installing mirrors, via the thought of the employees wanting to spend more time standing in the hall. Or it might lead to some other solution which one might not have thought of if one hadn't asked the question.

This is the method used when the cheese stuffed pizza crust was developed: what is a pizza? It's dough with cheese on the outside, so let's put the cheese inside: effectively the dough is outside the cheese

Source: www.tescjanewood.com/deBonoCreativityTechniques.doc