I recently wrapped up a graduate seminar in Creative Thinking and Critical Thought in the Master of Health Care program. This is the forth time I’ve led the seminar, and it is part of our Leadership Seminar Series (LSS). The LSS is designed with three purposes: to give potential graduate students a feel for graduate education, to earn a specific leadership certificate, and or to round out skills competencies we require in our degree, but don’t specifically teach in our core curriculum.
Here are some observations I’ve made about the learners in this seminar and why this skill domain is critical for future leaders.
Creativity and creative thinking are not the same. Often times, learners in our program confuse “creativity” with “creative thinking”. Each of us is creative and it’s a part of who we are as humans. The working definition of creative thinking we use in our seminar is that thinking is any mental activity that helps formulate or solve a problem, make a decision, of fulfill a desire to understand. Is is a searching for answers, a reaching for meaning. (Ruggerio, The Art of Thinking) . Creative thinking this is using a creative process to guide our search for answers.
My second observation is that our seminar participants don’t often believe they can be a better creative thinker.
Creative thinking is a skill that can be taught. Our learning partners in our semianr often seem to assign a binary value to creative thinking: either a person is off-the-charts with abundant creativity, or a person has none. At the beginning our of seminar, in a self assessment, the learners typically say that critical thinking can be taught or learned but creative thinking can not be taught or learned.
But what we find through the seminar is often, we self limit our abilities by falling into predictable habits, learned on our own, or borrowed from others.
My observation of students in this seminar is they tend to be critical before they are creative. The may identify one or a few possible solutions, and then stop and immediately being to apply the critical thinking to eliminate options, even before the best options are uncovered. What even more interesting is the higher the stakes of the problem and the more complicated it is, the more limited the idea creation becomes and more self editing occurs.
For example, students came up with nearly twice as many possible uses for old socks (as an excercise) than possible solutions to a health insurance challenge. When asked about the difference, the learning partners reported a significant amount of self editing — not wanting to look stupid in front of their peers. However, concerning the old socks, the ideas flowed with no fear of peer criticism.
Today’s and tomorrow leaders need to find ways to build their creative thinking, to limit their self editing, and to capture their ideas. We’re training them both for jobs that don’t yet exist and to solve problems we have yet to identify.
