Unleashing Creative Thinking

Creativity. One of the skills required for the new era. Why is it that so many of us are in favor yet don't know what to do with such a saying?

Today, at our KMGN KM advanced methodologies course, Vincent Ribiere our dear friend from Thailand, led us through a journey on this important topic.

Preparing ourselves for the future, we must develop both our left-brain skills and capabilities in decision making, critical thinking, and strategic thinking and our right-brain skills and abilities in creative thinking.

Two takeaways:

First, questioning is a great technique. If the WHY question leads us, for example, to better critical thinking, then the WHAT IF question leads us to creative thinking. Try asking WHAT IF where it makes sense (What if I had an unlimited budget, what if I could change the rules), and try asking WHAT IF where it seems a bit silly (WHAT IF it was broken, what if you asked a fool). Vincent demonstrated two models of questions: The SCAMPER model and 100-Whats-of-Creativity. Be sure to be new, surprising, adding value through your ideas.

And second, for creativity knowledge has to flow. Here is where we, knowledge managers, can play a role. We know how to help knowledge sharing, we know how to help the knowledge flow.

So KMers, we have a job to complete. We can help creative thinking to succeed.

 This post was initially published in LinkedIn