The Creative Thinker’s Toolkit

205 Pages·2013·3.09 MB·English

by  The Great Courses

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Professor Gerard Puccio
Buffalo State—The State University of New York
Professor Gerard Puccio is Department Chair and Professor
at Buffalo State’s International Center for Studies in
Creativity, a unique academic department that offers the
world’s first master of science degree in creativity. Professor
Puccio holds a Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology from
The University of Manchester in England. He has written
more than 50 articles, chapters, and books and recently
coauthored The Innovative Team: Unleashing Creative
Potential for Breakthrough Results. Professor Puccio has
worked as a consultant with major corporations and was a
speaker at TEDxGramercy on the topic of creative thinking
as a life skill.
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Course No. 5955 © 2014 The Teaching Company. PB5955A k
PUBLISHED BY:
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The Teaching Company.
Gerard Puccio, Ph.D.
Department Chair and Professor,
International Center for Studies in Creativity
Buffalo State—The State University
of New York
Professor Gerard Puccio is Department Chair
and Professor at Buffalo State’s International
Center for Studies in Creativity, a unique
academic department that offers the world’s first
and leading master of science degree in creativity.
Professor Puccio holds a Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology from The
University of Manchester in England.
Professor Puccio has written more than 50 articles, chapters, and books.
He has coauthored three recent books—The Innovative Team: Unleashing
Creative Potential for Breakthrough Results; Creativity Rising: Creative
Thinking and Creative Problem Solving in the 21st Century; and Creative
Leadership: Skills That Drive Change—and is under contract to write a new
book on preparing students to join the innovation economy.
In recognition of his outstanding work as a scholar, Professor Puccio
received The State University of New York’s Research and Scholarship
Award in 2004 and the Buffalo State President’s Award for Excellence in
Research, Scholarship, and Creativity in 2007.
Professor Puccio is an accomplished speaker and consultant; he has worked
with major corporations, universities, and numerous school districts to
deliver training programs and keynote speeches. Some of his clients
include the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Fisher-Price brands,
Sun Life Financial, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Kraft Foods, Coca-Cola,
Rochester Institute of Technology, and Oklahoma State University. Recently,
Professor Puccio was a featured speaker at TEDxGramercy on the topic of
creative thinking as a life skill. He has delivered creativity workshops and
presentations in such countries as France, England, Spain, Italy, Tanzania,
Hong Kong, Singapore, the Dominican Republic, and Canada.
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Professor Puccio’s research interests include the identification of creative
thinking preferences, person-environment fit, and the efficacy of creativity
training. He is currently working on an impact study of a creative leadership
training program at the BBC. ■
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
Professor Biography ............................................................................i
Course Scope .....................................................................................1
LECTURE GUIDES
LECTURE 1
The Creative Person—Practice and Passion .....................................4
LECTURE 2
Lateral Thinking Is a Survival Skill ....................................................12
LECTURE 3
Creative Styles—Adaptors and Innovators.......................................19
LECTURE 4
Combining Opposites—Diverge, Then Converge ............................26
LECTURE 5
Principles for Unleashing Your Imagination ......................................33
LECTURE 6
Principles for Converging on the Best Ideas ....................................40
LECTURE 7
Stages of the Creative Process—and You .......................................46
LECTURE 8
Clarifying the Challenge ...................................................................52
LECTURE 9
Clarify Even More—Webbing and Storyboarding .............................59
LECTURE 10
Classic Brainstorming and Brainwriting ............................................67
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Table of Contents
LECTURE 11
Tools for Enhanced Brainstorming....................................................73
LECTURE 12
Borrowing and Modifying Ideas ........................................................81
LECTURE 13
Systematic Tools to Generate New Ideas .........................................88
LECTURE 14
Developing Ideas—Toward Great Solutions .....................................95
LECTURE 15
Prototypes—How Designers Test Ideas .........................................101
LECTURE 16
Evaluating Creative Solutions and Making Decisions ....................108
LECTURE 17
Giving Ideas Legs—Implementation Planning................................114
LECTURE 18
Persuasion and the Selling of New Ideas .......................................121
LECTURE 19
Tools for Bringing It All Together .....................................................126
LECTURE 20
Lifting the Emotional Lid on Creativity ............................................133
LECTURE 21
The Environment—Physical and Psychological .............................140
LECTURE 22
Creative Leadership—Regardless of Title ......................................147
LECTURE 23
Overcoming Blocks and Barriers ....................................................153
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Table of Contents
LECTURE 24
Living a Creative Life ......................................................................160
SUPPLEmENTaL maTERIaL
Bibliography ....................................................................................166
FourSight® Thinking Profile .............................................................177
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The Creative Thinker’s Toolkit
Scope:
The highest level of human thought is creativity. Rather than being a
skill that is exclusive to a rare gifted few, it is a way of thinking and
behaving that can be achieved by all. However, many see creativity
as mysterious, intuitive, or strictly innate. To the contrary, creative thinking
is a skill that can be examined, practiced, and deliberately developed.
Scientific study demonstrates that, like other skills, creative thinking can
be enhanced. This course draws on the more than 60 years of research and
practice in the field of creativity studies and creativity education. Research
and practice has highlighted the programs, approaches, and tools that are
most effective in moving creativity from a chance occurrence to a more
predictable outcome. Additionally, lectures throughout this course make
direct connections between deliberate creative methods used by great
creators—such as Mozart, Spielberg, Picasso, Jobs, Angelou, Wright,
Rowling, Edison—and learnable tools that can be applied to a range of
creative challenges, from everyday to grand. By the end of this course,
you will have acquired a toolkit of creative methods usable in a variety of
contexts, from professional to personal, and across all disciplines, from more
artistic endeavors to business applications.
The course follows the waves of research associated with the scientific
study of creativity. The first three lectures explore what it means to be
a creative person. The first lecture examines the importance of play,
passion, and purpose as the necessary fuel to individual creativity. In this
lecture, you are encouraged to apply your first tool, “yes and,” in place
of the more commonly used “yes but” reaction to new ideas. The second
lecture examines how creativity is a natural human phenomenon, drawing
on information from evolution that highlights the fact that our ability to
creatively solve problems provides the human species with a necessary
competitive advantage. The ability to think in lateral ways, being flexible in
thought—as opposed to vertical thinking, which is digging deeper into the
same line of reasoning—is essential to the generation of breakthrough ideas.
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The third lecture takes a contemporary look at the creative person, shifting
from identifying characteristics of highly creative people to looking at the
different ways in which people express their creativity.
The next wave of investigation in the field of creativity explored whether
creative thinking was teachable and trainable. The fourth lecture lays the
foundation for the fundamental thinking skills that unleash imagination,
known as divergent thinking, and those skills that help to improve the
retention and development of the most promising options, referred to as
convergent thinking. The effective balance between divergent thinking and
convergent thinking is the heartbeat of the creative process. Lectures 5 and 6
delve deeply into these two skill areas, providing specific principles proven
to enhance divergent and convergent thinking abilities.
The seventh lecture introduces the complete creative process and explores
how individuals report different degrees of preference for the thinking
associated with the four areas found in the universal creative process:
clarify, ideate, develop, and implement. Lectures 8 through 19 move you
sequentially through the stages of the creative process, adding a large set
of tools designed to improve problem clarification, idea generation, solution
development, and implementation planning. A range of tools, from basic to
advanced, are provided for each step—tools that can be applied immediately,
either when working alone or to help improve creative thinking in groups.
Creativity involves both the head and the heart. In Lecture 20, the emotional
side of creativity is explored; without the right emotional attitude, the
cognitive tools become rather limited. Emotions can be thought of as the
internal climate for creativity. The next lecture identifies aspects of the
external environment, both physical and psychological, that promote creative
thinking. Whether a manager, parent, teacher, or someone who decides
to exert influence, creative thinking is now considered a core leadership
competence, and effective leadership, in turn, fosters an environment
conducive for creative thinking (see Lecture 22).
Life is fraught with challenges, and thus, many consider creative thinking
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op to be a life skill. As such, the ways in which you can apply the material
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S from this course is limited only by your imagination. Lecture 23 provides
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