Shift Gears

Triggers for creative thinking

Creative problem solving in the workplace often begins outside the workplace.

• George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr. was an engineer whose Pittsburgh, PA firm inspected metals for railroad and bridge builders. As a child he had loved to watch the big paddle boats on the Carson River near his childhood home in Nevada. This fascination sparked his design of the Ferris Wheel for the 1893 Columbian exhibition in Chicago.
• In the early 1940s, as he returned from taking his dog for a walk, George de Mestral noticed his dog's coat and his pants were covered with pesky cockleburs. This observation led to the creation of Velcro; which consists of a strip of fabric covered with small burr-like hooks and another strip covered with soft fabric-like loops.
• President Truman was able to manage the stress of a wartime presidency with remarkable levels of energy and fortitude. When a reporter commented on this, Truman described his use of the "foxhole in my mind." Just as soldiers used foxholes for protection, Truman had developed a way to retreat to a mental source of relaxation and relief.

You've heard about the value of having a wide range of experiences, "stocking the pond" with perspectives that inform your approaches to creative challenges. You also know how a hectic work schedule can preclude taking regular, stimulating excursions. The following exercise offers an opportunity to sidestep this limitation, and approach your challenge from several different points of view. Change the images, use it frequently, and recognize new possibilities.

Click here and use Shift Gears

Sidebar: Why this works

Perception involves registering information from your senses, recognizing meaningful patterns, and attributing values in a way that makes sense. What "makes sense" to you is a function of your past experiences. If the perception of a large, active, furry animal prompts a memory of dog bites, you'll have one rapid response pattern. If the same stimuli prompt a memory of a beloved childhood pet, you have another.

Your brain's ability to quickly order the stimuli bombarding your senses enables you to function efficiently. Without it, you'd be overwhelmed into a state of stupefaction. The more frequently a set of stimuli produce the same effect, the more rapid and less conscious the reaction.

This is excellent for everyday thinking; especially when the status quo is sufficient. It inhibits creative thinking, however, because it guarantees that when you look at a certain stimuli (like a challenge statement) you will only attend to and encode what you have always attended to and encoded.

Shift Gears increases the odds of connecting something that hasn't been previously connected, or re-arranging your knowledge in new ways, by forcing you to begin from outside your patterned way of perceiving things. The more forced or uncomfortable the process of linking the reactions you list under "sensibility" to your challenge statement, the more likely it is that you are breaking your typical thought patterns to generate the "possibility."

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