If you want to design the future, you need three kinds of thinking: Critical, Constructive, and Creative Thinking. The best scholars of the last 2000+ years has only told you how to use one kind--Critical Thinking. It has taught you to analyze a problem, find the cause, and remove it if you can. But what if you can't? And what if there isn't a problem just a world of potential ideas, inventions, and improvements you can't get to?

A Certified Instructor can come into your organization and custom-tailor a training program to meet your particular needs. Corporate Global Licenses are available if you wish to train widely within your organization.

SERIOUS CREATIVITY--A PERSPECTIVE

The world has changed!  To maintain competitive advantage, you must reconceptualize your business.  Better quality and better service are essential, but they are not enough today.  Creativity and innovation are the only engines that will drive lasting success.  Edward de Bono, in 1969, coined the phrase Lateral Thinking which is now in the Oxford English Dictionary. 

“A way of thinking which seeks the solution to intractable problems through unorthodox methods or elements which would normally be ignored in logical thinking.”

Over the last two decades, the two main trends have been (1) total quality and (2) downsizing—doing more with less.  Today, that is not enough.  You need creativity in order to FIND BETTER WAYS of doing things.  It’s not enough to improve quality in each separate part of an organization.  The result is that the organization is still locked into an overall operation that really needs changing.  Because they have only looked at quality, not creativity, they end up operating inefficiently, but with high quality.  You need creativity within quality.

Similarly within restructuring and/or rightsizing, it is very inefficient if you just have a blanket “get rid of everything, cut all costs”.  You remove any cushion that allows you to do new things, to do new ventures.  You maximize on your existing concepts.  So even within restructuring or rightsizing, you need far more creativity than is currently the case.

The importance of creativity is from this basic concept:  We have a tendency to think in set patterns, which is of value, but it prevents us from tackling problems from totally new perspectives.  When you have wrung out all the fat, all of the excess, all of the unnecessary expenses, when you are lean and fit, you’re not going to get anymore benefit from downsizing and pursuing quality—That is where creativity comes in.  What are the values, what are the concepts, what can you offer, what is the surpetition?  Surpetition goes beyond competition (competition merely says that I am competing with my competitors).  Surpetition is seeking above, creating value for your customers and clients.  There is a growing need for creativity. 

Most of us believe that you are born creative, that some people are given creative instincts.  If you look back over your life, how often have you ever sat down and thought about how do I think? What is my thinking process?  How can I create new and better thoughts?  The traditional view of creativity is you take off your tie, sit on the floor, feel free, and wonderful thinking is going to happen if you are uninhibited.  That is a very weak approach to creativity and has held back the development of creativity. Tools that foster innovation and greater creativity can and must be used deliberately and specifically.  We can then move away from this lip service—it’s nice to be creative, we’re the creative people—to a really serious investment and commitment to creativity. 

“Lateral Thinking, Six Thinking Hats, Direct Attention Thinking, & Six Value Medals are four of the most powerful techniques for innovative thinking” (Dr. David Tanner, DuPont).  Creativity is like investing in research—R&D.  You cannot guarantee that every time you put a dollar into research you’re going to get a dollar out of it.  You CAN guarantee that if you never put any money into research, you’re never going to get any good ideas out of it.  It is the same with creativity. YOU NEED TO INVEST IN CREATIVITY.  It’s a very low-cost investment compared to anything else with maximum potential return-on-investment.

NOTE:  All Workshops are CUSTOMIZED with your Specific Learning Objectives.

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Mary Jo Huard, Owner at 972-394-8906 or 1-888-978-6632 (Toll Free) or

E-mail: mjhuard@swtinstitute.com

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