Topic Subtopic “Pure intellectual stimulation that can be popped into Professional Thinking Skills the [audio or video player] anytime.” —Harvard Magazine T The Creative “Passionate, erudite, living legend lecturers. Academia’s h best lecturers are being captured on tape.” e C —The Los Angeles Times r e a t Thinker’s Toolkit i v “A serious force in American education.” e T —The Wall Street Journal h i n k e r Course Guidebook ’s T o o lk i t 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. THE GREAT COURSES® Corporate Headquarters 4840 Westfields Boulevard, Suite 500 Chantilly, VA 20151-2299 USA G Phone: 1-800-832-2412 u www.thegreatcourses.com id e Professor Photo: © Jeff Mauritzen - inPhotograph.com. b Cover Image: © Sergey Nivens/Shutterstock. o o Course No. 5955 © 2014 The Teaching Company. PB5955A k PUBLISHED BY: THE GREAT COURSES Corporate Headquarters 4840 Westfields Boulevard, Suite 500 Chantilly, Virginia 20151-2299 Phone: 1-800-832-2412 Fax: 703-378-3819 www.thegreatcourses.com Copyright © The Teaching Company, 2014 Printed in the United States of America This book is in copyright. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of 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. i 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. ■ ii 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 iii 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 iv Table of Contents LECTURE 24 Living a Creative Life ......................................................................160 SUPPLEmENTaL maTERIaL Bibliography ....................................................................................166 FourSight® Thinking Profile .............................................................177 v vi 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. 1 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 e op to be a life skill. As such, the ways in which you can apply the material c S from this course is limited only by your imagination. Lecture 23 provides 2