You’re stuck. You’re working on a project or assignment and your mind shuts down. It’s clear that ideas are not flowing as rapidly as you would like. You’re losing steam and your mental energies are on an extended “Pause.” Eventually, you start telling yourself, “I’m not creative,” or “I just can’t come up with a decent idea to save my soul.”

You’ve hit a brick wall, creatively speaking.

For much of our formal education, we are directed to look for a single solution to every problem or question (e.g. How many countries are in Africa? What is the chemical symbol for salt?). We have been conditioned to think that for every intellectual challenge there is one, and only one, way to solve that problem. Our educational experiences have been focused on learning “the right answer” or discovering a pre-determined response listed in a teacher’s manual or in the mind of an instructor. Seldom have we been offered opportunities to consider that there might be a multitude of potential responses to issues or conundrums. The “one-problem, one-answer” syndrome has been thoroughly ingrained into our patterns of thinking.

Sir Ken Robinson put this all into perspective when he wrote, “…too often our educational systems don’t enable students to develop their natural creative powers. Instead, they promote uniformity and standardization. The result is that we’re draining people of their creative possibilities and…producing a workforce that’s conditioned to prioritize conformity over creativity.” In short, by the time we graduate from high school or college, our innovative capacities are often reduced to an “I’m just not creative” mindset.

 

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“I Can’t Do This!”

Edward de Bono, the pioneer in lateral thinking and originator of the “Six Thinking Hats” method, suggests that, all too often, when we are faced with a creative challenge, we resort to an “I can never do this” frame of thinking. In short, we categorically reject the possibility of creative responses since we don’t have the expertise or we have suffered a plethora of creative rejections in the past.

This is also the result of a seemingly non-stop barrage of low-level (fact-based) questions over the course of our educational experiences. (By the time they graduate, most high school students have been exposed to well over one million classroom questions.) Consequently, students come to the conclusion that education is merely collecting information or memorizing lots of facts. Substantial research, classroom observations, and anecdotal evidence over the past three decades confirm an immutable fact of classroom life: that is, students tend to read and think based on the kinds of questions they anticipate receiving from a teacher. That is to say, when a significant number of questions are factual in nature (typically more than 80% of any classroom interaction), students get the message that memorizing stuff is much more important than creating multiple responses.

As a result, we frequently generate restraining statements when faced with a creative challenge. Since we are unable to generate a single “right answer,” we give up and offer an excuse/explanation for our creative incompetencies. Here are some typical responses:

• “I can’t do this.”
• “Apparently, I don’t know very much about that.”
• “I’m too busy to do that.”
• “That’s way out of my league.”
• “I’m not qualified.”
• “That will take way too much time.”

You will note that these statements put restrictions on our ability to solve a problem. They inhibit the possibility of creative thinking and effectively extinguish the opportunity for answers. In short, we self-reject a chance to solve a challenge.

“In What Ways…?”

Instead, de Bono advocates for “IWW” (“In what ways…?”) questions. These are questions that open up our minds to unique possibilities and stimulate the generation of solutions and creative explorations.

In place of the all-too-common self-destructive behavior relative to our creative instincts, here are some thought-provoking questions that stimulate multiple possibilities. That is, whenever we are faced with a creative challenge, instead of resorting to an “I’m not creative” response, we should consider queries that produce multiple responses.

• “In what ways can I…?”
• “If it were possible, how could I…?”
• “If this is time-consuming, how could I shorten it?”
• “What if there was more than one way to figure this out?”
• “What if I looked at this from another point of view?”
• “How would my best friend (or worst enemy) approach this?”
• “What might be the worst possible solution for this issue?”
• “What are some different ways I could…?”
• “I wonder if I could come up with ______ responses?”

One thing you will note about these queries is that they require something more than a “Yes” or “No” response. In fact, they require a plethora of responses, any one of which could be a potential solution. By transforming common negative statements into multi-response questions, you give your brain creative license to examine a multiplicity of responses; you ignite dynamic conversations in your mind. So too, do you suspend self-judgement and embrace a diversity of potential solutions. Bottom line: Creative thinkers regularly ask themselves open-ended, exploratory, and flexible questions. They seldom, if ever, default to “This can’t be done,” or “I’m not creative.”