One of the utmost needs for managers and specialists in today's scenario is to enable themselves to create new thinking frameworks, to both spot changes in the state of things and to respond to opportunities and difficulties. These frameworks (or strategies) are not "available at a store near you" or on any Internet sites. Prospect users of the methodology have to learn how to develop them with their own resources; once the process has been acquired, the alternatives are infinite.
Only human intelligence, when thinking and acting criategically — that is, integrating strategy and creative processes — can configure itself for the transition, the unpredictable, the yet-to-be and the so-called Impossibles and Invincibles
Thinking as a Process
Many are the kinds and varieties of thinking. One of them, for example, seems to have been set to keep a supposedly thinking being in a state of confusion. The most frequent of them consists in the mere repetition of fossilized concepts and passing trends. And, of course, the most congenial of all: the one that, through indifference, contributes to no results at all.
Thinking, however, is "the operation through which intelligence intervenes in reality with a purpose." Solving, creating, transforming, discovering, inventing and anticipating are some of the verbs that can describe the qualities of thinking.
Breaking the boundaries of 'built-in' thinking
The most prominent form of thinking in today's culture wanders around in a smooth, cruise-control operated flight, with no sign of autonomy, limiting itself to the repetition of fossilized concepts and pieces of knowledge. We can, however, also acknowledge the existence of active, autonomous thinking, that, although minoritary, does its best to intervene in the world. The operational rationale of this "interventional thinking" is to not limit itself to repetition. Its role consists, if nothing else, in rethinking.
Human beings can go either way. Some authors will call the first one "linear thinking", while the second one has many nicknames: lateral (De Bono), creative, strategic, transformative, innovative.
Two facts are worth pointing out. First, there's nothing wrong or bad in the "smooth-flying", repetitive thinking; it's economical and will occupy most of the time of your intelligence anyway. Second, since the first use of intelligence is repetition, this form of thinking builds itself in the brain and settles there, as if it were the only one. Eventually, however, it will need some oxygen to survive; this oxygen, this update, this "fertilization", comes from the interventional thinking.
People will over time develop other "moves" for their thinking. Reading habits, for example, stimulate some new thinking moves or tactics, like opening new "channels" for your mental processes. Professional abilities, interactions with other people, philosophical or religious choices, deep contacts with other cultures, therapies, tensions and polemics or whatever experiences processed through some degree of reflection will also make room for new tactics and paths. In the end, however, these are products of chance and, being methodless, will never move ahead, unable to constitute a dynamic that can generate new paths, moves and tactics. It’s like they are the "final destinations" of intelligence. In any culture, any professional activity or any degree of schooling, developing any fluency in "interventional thinking", the one that restarts, discovers, invents, transforms, innovates, anticipates, takes initiatives and manages, is unfortunately a privilege of very few.
From Creative Process to Creategics
The forerunners of the study of the phenomenon of creativity between the end of the 19th. century and the first half of the 20th. century (Coleridge, Valéry, Hadamard, Poincaré, Kekulé, Whitehead, Freud and Einstein himself) focused on the understanding of the "process through which we generate ideas."
The Creative Educational Foundation, located in Buffalo, NY, was the home of a very proficuous movement starting in the 50's. Being an advertising man, Alex Osborne, its intrepid founder, was obviously dedicated to the "creation of new, relevant and original ideas." The creation of ideas has indeed been a trademark of the Foundation, but it was there, or because or around it, that many techniques and instruments for creative acts and products were created.
The fact that actually gave birth to the movement for creative education, though, was discovering that creative thinking can be deliberate. Before the beginning of the 1950's, it was believed that creativity was an "accidental spark". Both the notions of it being accidental or a mere spark have since then been denied by the methodologized practice of the creative process.
When some Brazilians, the founder of ILACE among them, went to Buffalo in the 1970's, the methodology of the creative process was already being drafted, under the name of CPS (Creative Problem Solving). The solving system where this methodology falls in was called "general system" for sometime. Such name, which reminded the systemic character of the solving journey, was eventually abandoned.
Discovering that the creative process can be deliberate was the starting point of the development of many thinking methods and instruments and also for the rediscovery of some old ones, like the maieutics. This was the track that led to the development of what is known as the methodology of the creative process worldwide.
The methodology of the creative process starts at the innate functions of the thinking mind. With no intention of interfering in them, it runs this permanent inventory of the abilities of thinking, multiplies them through new procedures and attitudes and complements them with the two biggest lacks for both the educational systems and companies: systemic reasoning and the sensibility to processes.
A historical analysis can lead us to say that this methodology has its roots in the art of thinking, for it retrieves instruments and forms of questioning that were already in use in ancient history and at the same time incorporates reflections and developments of modern and contemporary thinking.
How the methodological fusion took place
The discoveries and developments are so recent that language can't catch up with them. An example of that is the word "creativity" still being understood the same way it was in the 1950's or even before, even in circles of opinion-makers. It is frequently regarded as a synonym of imagination, which was the "ingredient" on which the attention of the first researchers, even Osborn's, was focused.
One of the great contributions of the American researchers was a result of the shift from the initial focus on imagination and idea generation to focus on the creative process. Such notion led them to first find out the alternating the mental states of divergence and convergence is the key to make creative thinking deliberate; they soon noticed that this kind or quality of thinking can’t be solely attributed to one feature of intelligence or the other, but to a whole myriad of functions, procedures and attitudes interwoven.
What we call creative thinking is actually the improved performance of the functions and abilities of mind that are innate to all human beings.
ILACE's methodological fusion of strategic thinking and the creative process not only widens the range of application of the ideas brought up by Osborn, Parnes, Noller and so many others, but also grants its user autonomy and power of transformation that are unparalleled in the history of thinking.
Creategical Challenge Solving surprises and motivates professionals from the most different fields for the pluses it brings to its user. He or she must not, though, understand it as a very advanced problem-solving system, under risk of not profiting from all the other tools they are granted with: mobilizing and "stretching" active thinking, making it into an instrument of citizenship and transformation in the current world scenario. This precise view of things generated our motto, "peeling pineapples and reinventing the world".
Therefore, besides being a result-guaranteed challenge processor, this methodology also works as attitudinal thinking's "gym instructor". By "stretching" the abilities of identifying and generating alternatives, its practice strengthens the "critical confidence" to deal with new situations. The methodological evolution of discovering/inventive/transformative thought in Brazil can be described by its own "state of the art".
- The milestone is definitely the methodology of creative process developed from the patiently developed work of three generations called CPS (Creative Problem Solving), at the Creative Education Foundation. The best known forerunners are Osborn, Parnes and Noller, who are still to be properly recognized by all the difference they made in the world. CPS was ILACE's starting point.
- "Critical thinking", which is an educational trend in the USA, was added to ILACE's methodology since it was first divulged in Brazil.
- The experience in dealing with thinking's essential options has, however, persuaded the institution to incorporate the heuristic approach in the processing.
- That's when the synergy shown as inevitable by the work with the Brazilian produced a gigantic quality leap that grants decision-makers in any field with unparalleled power.
Because it is the systemic integration of thinking-towards-action, Creategics can't be mistakenly understood as merely "creativity" and has nothing to do with self help, being strongly recommended to the ones not easily fooled by the promises of "gurus" and market-oriented preachers of the caramelized kind.
Creategics is the methodological synthesis of strategic thinking, creative process, heuristic and critical thinking. Therefore, the higher the upgrade in the procedures of thinking, the more empowering and autonomy it can add even to highly demanding activities such as consulting, elaboration and strategic follow-up, knowledge management, organizational diplomacy, political action and high level managerial development.