Creative Thinking Is A skill and Must Be Developed.

Organizations believe that creative thinking is a skill and must be integrated into their culture and business models to help achieve more and better results. A commitment to idea generation, divergent thinking and finding creative solutions to everyday business challenges can mean the difference between stagnation or thriving in today’s competitive environment.

What is creative thinking?

In her book, In Your Creative Element,Now Go Create founder Claire Bridges reviewed hundreds of definitions of creativity and creative thinking, and knows that creativity is notoriously tricky to define!

In a business context, creative thinking is a way to solve problems, tackle challenges and create new opportunities that will lead to success and competitive advantage. Creative ideas can help with customer service problems, creating new products and services, behaviour change, brand development, sales and marketing tactics and even staff motivation/morale.

Even a seemingly mundane challenge, such as how to encourage people to complete their timesheets, can be significantly improved by applying creative thinking.

You could use try one of these exercises

• The 30 Circles Challenge is an icebreaker designed to encourage creative confidence. It is a great activity to start a brainstorming session, or a session to solve a complex problem.
• Use an empathy map to step into your employees shoes and find out what they think, feel, say and do about the problem, what the barriers and pain points are and try to tackle them
• Question Storm the problem instead of having a brainstorm – better questions produce better answers
• The Game of Possibilities is helpful in getting team members used to communicating with each other and thinking creatively
• 101 Uses for a dried-up pen is a creative thinking activity that encourages people to rethink the uses that can be given to a common object