8 strategies to develop creativity

We live in a world where everything seems made up and defined. However, new things emerge every day that are the work not of innate talents, but of people who have followed strategies to enhance their creativity. A resource that can be used to improve our environment and to see our life from another perspective.

How to enhance creativity?

When we try to solve problems creatively, we want to be inspired and a great and original solution will appear in a matter of a few seconds. And it is something that sometimes happens. The associations of ideas that occur in the right cerebral hemisphere between experienced experiences, implicit knowledge and sensory stimuli are the spark of what we call inspiration (this feeling that an inner light illuminates us and that the pieces of the puzzle suddenly fit together). ). But this phenomenon occurs exceptionally, since it only occurs 1% of the time at most..

We want to be inspired to face the new problems – and the old unresolved ones – that the current environment presents us with. And we know that we can all be much more creative, regardless of our intelligence and profession (something that Joy P. Guilford, pioneer of the so-called Psychology of creativity, already anticipated in 1950). But we’ve also realized that inspiration doesn’t always come as fast as we’d like. As Professor Teresa M. Amabile, from Harvard University, warns, it is essential that, in addition to having motivation, we apply our “creative thinking skills” so that the creative spark occurs (delayed). That is, to achieve “induced inspiration” in the absence of “spontaneous inspiration”.

As summarized by educator and writer Sir Ken Robinson, Professor Emeritus at the University of Warwick and Consultant to the UK Ministry of Education, creativity has an innate part – all children are very creative until the educational system inhibits them – and a part that can be learned, in the same way that one learns to read.

The psychology of creativity

The Psychology of creativity has collected dozens of useful mental strategies to acquire “creative thinking skills”.. We are going to present some of them in broad strokes, as an encouragement to get to know them better:

Read Also: 3 easy-to-make chia pudding recipes

1. The analogy

It consists of taking inspiration from another domain of human knowledge to transfer existing solutions. For example: roller skating is born from placing a “car” on each foot. If an analogy is inaccurate, it will give us mediocre solutions. This is what happened with the first computer networks: they copied the human telephone network, and until in 1989 Tim Berners-Lee –dissatisfied with the strong drawbacks of the system– did not devise to apply the analogy with a spider web (web), not the bases were created for the networks to expand throughout the world (world wide web). This is how this impressive progress of humanity that we call the Information Society was generated.

2. The combination or synthesis

It is about imagining new benefits to already invented products or tools. A historical precedent was the famous “Swiss army knife” with models that cover up to 41 functions. A more recent stellar success has been the smartphone (smartphone), which has revolutionized the way we communicate and work, and which combines functions as diverse as an electronic agenda, digital games, a camera, a calculator, the Internet, GPS, and a flashlight. .., without forgetting the primitive: mobile phone.

3. Lateral thinking

Promoted by the psychologist Edward de Bono, it consists of looking at things in an unusual way, not to think like most people, but to look for a different, “divergent”, lateral look. Author theater and cinema that shy away from so-called “commercial approaches” can be included in this strategy, as well as restaurants that offer unusual menus or hotels aimed at specific types of clients, to give just a few examples.

4. Reverse logic

Inspiration comes from “denying the greatest”: It is no longer a question of a side view, but of looking at things backwards from how everyone looks at them. When all the coffee shops created fully urban and dynamic environments, adjusted to the rush of today’s world, Starbucks triumphed with the opposite concept: “Feel at home and without rushing”. When furniture was seen as art or craft objects that accompanied generations, the Swedish company Ikea triumphed in the world by proposing functional and perishable furniture. There are thousands of examples of pending ideas: an electric blanket that cools instead of heats; a machine that helps us fall asleep instead of waking up, a vehicle that drives instead of being driven…

Read Also: Meditation to improve concentration at exam time and ward off anxiety

5. The worst enemy can be the best ally

It is a variant of the previous mental strategy. When a fire breaks out in the great forests of the United States, firefighters – who find themselves powerless to attack its magnitude with water – use fire against fire: they burn areas of forest in a controlled manner that serve as firebreaks. When the merchant shipping industry failed in the 1960s due to the great improvement in the highway and highway network and, consequently, in land transport, the solution was to ally with the enemy: by converting the loads into boxes whole trucks (containers) and make life easier for road transport, they recovered their market share.

6. The elimination of alternatives

When the resolution method offers us a large number of alternatives to try and the first attempts fail, it is very human to get discouraged.. But among the qualities of a good creative is persistence, resistance to frustration. When Thomas A. Edison was looking for the solution to the filament of his famous light bulb, in a press conference that he offered after carrying out more than a thousand failed experiences, a journalist asked him why he did not give up and he replied: “Because each failure teaches us new things and it brings us closer to the solution.” A year later, when he carried out almost 1,800 tests, he found what he was looking for and humanity entered the age of electricity.

7. The impediment as motivation

Do not confuse “difficult” with “impossible”. If we want to be creative, we cannot accept the word “impossible”. If we don’t know how to solve something, it’s better to label it as “difficult” and it will be a challenge to overcome: solving something difficult is, logically, much more rewarding than solving something easy. The key is to overcome the main obstacle. When looking for a solution we find a strong impediment, we have to concentrate our efforts against this obstacle. Once overcome, most likely, several solutions will appear before our eyes, all of them valid.

Read Also: Ideas to make a healthy barbecue that everyone will like

For the same reason, a good source of inspiration can be overcoming some daily discomfort, the emotion of disgust that something we use regularly causes us and that doesn’t work as we think it could. A creative person is, by definition, non-conformist. He does not resign himself by saying the classic inhibiting phrase: “If this is so, it will be because nothing can be done to improve it”, or his cousin: “Surely others have already thought about it and if they have not improved it, it is because it came out too much expensive”. The vast majority of the inventions that give us comfort in our world today have been created by someone who wanted to overcome their own discomfort or that of their loved ones. It is not a question of being dissatisfied in a negative and pessimistic way thinking that everything is bad, but in a positive way, convinced that even good things can be improved.

8. Mental hygiene

It is important not to forget this strategy when, after a long time racking our brains to solve a problem, we do not find what we are looking for. So we have to relax and change our minds – what the political theorist Graham Wallas called “incubating” the problem. It is surprising how many times this break will bring us, at the most unexpected moment, the sudden inspiration that we have stopped chasing.

If we enjoy lots of useful products and services, it’s because so many people who have come before us have had creative ideas to improve the world. Our current society has an enormity of things pending to be solved. Let’s do it. Both for our personal satisfaction and for the comfort of future generations.

Put your inventiveness to work

Inspiration can be activated and creativity can be learned. To do this, you must have a certain disposition and follow some guidelines:

Have faith in your own ability. Seek inspiration by applying mental strategies like the ones we propose in the article. Pay attention to sensory stimuli. Apply methods to help creativity.