5 Ways to Improve Your Creative Thinking | Career Series

Summer is the season for internships and summer employment for many students, and it is also a perfect time to build on your creative thinking and innovation abilities so you’ll be in excellent condition to land that dream job after graduation.

Everyone believes that contemporary firms – especially those which are most popular to work for – significantly respect creative thinking and creativity. The challenge is, how can you be innovative without failing, seeming silly or duplicating what others have already proposed a hundred times?

Here are six techniques to boost your own creative thinking and innovation skills…

1. Create your own “Three Ifs”

Many brilliant innovators take an existing thing and ask smart questions to twist the entire notion of it and make it new. Steve Jobs didn’t start with the notion of a smartphone. He basically took an existing mobile phone and posed a very simple question: how can we enhance it to make it better – or the best?

Let’s be clear about this - there are no universal recipes for innovation, and each individual should establish her or his own method based on speciality, interest, manner of thinking, or even the sort of team s/he is engaging in.

Create creative thinking around three “ifs”:

(1) What would happen if I modify it (the object/ system/ social interaction, etc)?

(2) What would I modify or enhance about this thing if I wanted to utilise it in 10 years?

(3) What would I do if I had a one-million-dollar investment to enhance it?

These questions may become strong tools that can encourage you to think differently. It is vital to train these abilities by regularly employing the “three ifs” technique (or inventing your own set of questions) about all kinds of topics. And many fresh ideas will crop out.

For example, let us take a bicycle, think about it and ask the “three if” questions, so we may come up with a fresh concept. Initially the pupils aggressively objected and were quite doubtful. However, after numerous rounds of conversations and brainstorming they started to come up with many fresh unique ideas. We broke down those inventions into mini course projects and my students’ teams won many cash prizes to execute their unique ideas.

2. Practice dreaming

The biggest contradiction is that creative thinking is not always the result of IQ or enlightenment through the famous apple falling on your head. It is a question of consistently developing your imagination, honing your abilities of observation and fantasizing, large or tiny.

It seems so easy, and yet in this day of information overload and highly charged metropolitan living, this vital ingredient is frequently lacking from our regular lives.

All too often we stay focused on the main task at hand, devoting our mental powers to routine actions (including Twitter and SMS), so that at the end of the day the most creative idea we can come up with is just to finally take a break in front of the TV or computer screen. Sound familiar?

Whatever you’re doing – whether it’s business or pleasure – practice spending time using the “three ifs” technique to whatever you observe or envision. This will help you get into the habit of creating room in your head for dreaming - crucial for creative thinking and invention.

3. Make time for coherent creative thought

Every textbook on creativity confirms to the need of setting aside clearly defined time for creative thought and creation. For example, Google expects its staff to dedicate at least 20% of their time to creative thinking or new initiatives. But frequently, even if we turn up ready to develop, nevertheless something doesn’t work and new ideas fail to pop out like popcorn.

There are two causes for this impasse. The first is that we don’t practice dreaming, and the second is we don’t practice concentrating on coherent thoughts.

Therefore, the third guideline of creative thinking is pretty simple: dedicate time – it can be an hour per day or per week – in which to practice creative thinking about anything particular.

A colleague informed me that when he was a student many years ago he began speculating about mobile phones — what they will be in 10 and 20 years’ time. Already in college his articles on this issue garnered considerable recognition, and after graduation he got a wonderful job designing applications for phones to make them more smarter and attractive for “millennials”.

4. Learn to pitch your ideas (in an elevator)

There is fundamental truth in the idea that Steve Jobs of Apple was exceptional at discovering and describing advancements based on existing items - computers, mobile phones, music players. He didn’t develop those items, but he made them better and he was superb at articulating why his version was superior to other competing commodities.

On many occasions I hear from my students, “But I had that idea first” or “I proposed something like that just recently and nobody listened to me.” In this situation I always highlight the bottom line – probably you did have a wonderful idea, but you didn’t express yourself clearly and excitingly enough to grab people’s attention, or help others to grasp the nature of your innovation or project.

There is an ancient adage, “If you cannot convey your concept in three phrases – you don’t have an idea!

” One of the most significant innovation abilities is the ability to offer a very brief and clear summary of a new concept (two to three phrases – like yelling through the closing door of an elevator) and to make a short presentation (two to three minutes – what is termed a “elevator pitch”). Like any other talent, the capacity to explain in this manner can only develop via extensive practise.

5. Bounce ideas off others

Even a brilliant inventor requires others around her or him to debate – or “bounce” – fresh innovative ideas and inventions. What do the greatest revolutionary concepts of our time have in common, from Microsoft (well, when it was young) to Google?

All of them were created by teams of people who stayed together to conceive the idea, plan their innovative projects, take them to investors and the public, and most importantly jointly brainstorm those innovations within the team – bouncing ideas, questions and improvements until the product was perfected to become the next multi-billion dollar “eureka.”

Therefore, a last key characteristic to add to your innovation skillset, is the capacity to be an useful team member, capable of bouncing ideas to the next level. For some young people this is quite natural, while for others it does not come so readily to be a team player. But it is never too late to train oneself in this manner of interaction.

Happy Advancing! 😉