تفکر خلاقانه چیست؟

Chapter 1

WHAT IS CREATIVE THINKING?

by Roger von Oech

from A Whack on the Side of the Head.-

How You Can Be More Creative

I once asked advertising legend Carl Ally what makes the creative person tick. Ally responded, “The creative person wants to be a know-it—all. He wants to know about all kinds of things: ancient history, nineteenth century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and hog futures.3 Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later or six years down the road. But he has faith that it will happen.”

I agree wholeheartedly. Knowledge is the stuff from which new ideas are made. Nonetheless, knowledge alone won’t make a person creative. I think that We’ve all known people who knew lots of facts and nothing creative happened. Their knowledge just sat in their crania because they didn’t think about what they knew in any new ways. The real key to being creative lies in what you do with your knowledge.

Creative thinking requires an attitude that allows you to search for ideas and manipulate your knowledge and experience. With this outlook,6 you try various approaches, first one, then another, often not getting anywhere. You use crazy, foolish, and impractical ideas as stepping stones to practical new ideas. You break the rules occasionally, and explore for ideas in unusual outside places. In short, by adopting a creative outlook you open yourself up both to new possibilities and to change.

A good example of a person who did this is Johann Gutenberg.

What Gutenberg did was combine two previously unconnected ideas: the Wine press and the coin punch. The purpose of the coin punch was to leave an image on a small area such as a gold coin. The function of the wine press Was, and still is, to apply force over a large area to squeeze the juice out of grapes. One day, Gutenberg, perhaps after he’d drunk a goblet or two of wine, playfully asked himself, “What if I took a bunch of these coin punches and put them under the force of the wine press so that they left their image on paper?” The resulting combination was the printing press and movable type.

Navy Admira Grace Hopper had the task of explaining the

meaning of a nanosecond to some non-technical computer users. (A nanosecond is a billionth of a second, and its the basic time interval of a supercomputer’s internal clock.) She wondered, “How cm I get them to understand the brevity of a nanosecond? Why not look at it as a space problem rather than a time problem? I’ll just use the distance light travels in one billionth of a second.” She pulled out a piece of string 30 centimeters long (11.8 inches) and told her visitors, “Here is one nanosecond.”

In 1792, the musicians of Franz Joseph Haydn’s orchestra got mad because the Duke promised them a Vacation, but continually postponed it. They asked Haydn to talk to the Duke about getting some time off. Haydn thought for a bit, decided to let music do the talking, and then wrote the “Farewell Symphony.” The performance began with a full orchestra, but as the piece went along, it was scored to need fewer and fewer instruments. As each musician finished his part, he blew out his candle and left the stage. They did this, one by one, until the stage was empty. The Duke got the message and gave them a vacation.

Then there’s Pablo Picasso. One day, he went outside his house and found an old bicycle. He looked at it for a little bit and took off the seat and the handle bars. Then he Welded them together to create the head of a bull.

Each of these examples illustrates the creative minds power to transform one thing into another. By changing perspective and playing with our knowledge, We can make the ordinary extraordinary and the unusual commonplace. In this way, wine presses squeeze out information, string is transformed into nanoseconds, labor grievances become symphonies, and bicycle seats turn into bulls’ heads.

The Nobel Prize winning physician Albert Szent-Gyiirgyi put it well when he said: Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.

Here are two quick exercises to give you a chance to “think something different.”

Exercise 1: An eccentric“) old king Wants to give his throne to one of his two sons. He decides that a horse race will be run and the son who owns the slower horse will become king. The sons, each fearing that the other will cheat by having his horse run less fast than it is capable, ask the court fool for his advice. With only two words the fool tells them how to make sure that the race will be fair. What are the two words’?

Exercise 2: Can you think of a way in which you put a sheet of newspaper on the floor so that when two people stand face to face on it, they won’t be able to touch one another? Cutting or tearing the paper is not allowed. Neither is tying up the people or preventing them from moving.

Why don’t we “think something different” more often? There are several main reasons. The first is that we don’t need to be creative for most of what we do. For example, we don’t need to be creative when we’re driving on the freeway,“ or riding in an elevator, or waiting in line at a grocery store. We are creatures of habit when it comes to the business of living—everything from doing paperwork to tying our shoes to haggling” with telephone solicitors.

For most of our activities, these routines are indispensable.

Without them, our lives would be in chaos, and we wouldn’t get much accomplished. If you got up this morning and started contemplating the bristles on your toothbrush or questioning the meaning of toast, you probably wouldn’t make it to work. Staying on routine thought paths enables us to do the many things we need to do without having to think about them.

Another reason were not more creative is that we haven’t been taught to be. Much of our educational system is an elaborate game of “guess what the teacher is thinking.” Many of us have been taught to think that the best ideas are in someone else’s head. How many of your teachers asked you, “What original ideas do you have?” There are times, however, when you need to be creative and generate new ways to accomplish your objectives. When this happens, your own belief systems may prevent you from doing so.

Here we come to a third reason why we don’t “think something different” more often. Most of us have certain attitudes that lock our thinking into the status quo and keep us thinking “more of the same.” These attitudes are necessary for most of what we do, but they can get in the way when we’re trying to be creative.