Soft skills that will be acquired

Knowledge

1. Recognise paradigms
2. Communications patterns
3. Difference between creativity and creative thinking

Skills

1. Apply the creative thinking
2. Conscious of “cause-effect”
3. Problem-solving

Introduction

Creative thinking is essential to break paradigms, but do we really know what a paradigm is? It is easy; a paradigm establishes our perception of reality. For example: a group of scientists at the University of Harvard placed 5 monkeys in a cage. Next to them there were some stairs and at the top of it, there were some bananas. We all know monkeys like bananas, so this is what happened: when the monkeys saw the bananas, one of them climbed to take one and, in the meanwhile, the rest of the monkeys that were on the ground were falling into a bucket of water.

During the next five days, the scientists repeated the experiment and always when a monkey climbed the stairs and took a banana, the rest were falling in a bucket of water. But, from here on, the scientists observed that when one of the monkeys tried to climb and take a banana, the rest stopped this monkey with a hit, to avoid the bucket of water falling on them. Obviously, monkeys did not speak, but if we could ask one of them why they hit the one climbing to take the banana, they would have answered: “I don’t know, things are always like that”. This example answers a lot of questions, one of them and, one of the most important ones, is that a paradigm is born by ourselves, or we do also follow paradigms of the masses (such as the example of the monkeys where after a while it could be observed that the monkeys hit the one who climbed the stairs, just because it was just a habit). Can you imagine what would happen if the monkeys would have tried to break the paradigm? They could have eaten as many bananas as they would have wanted. The same happens to us. If we try to break paradigms and replace them by new ones, we will enjoy improvements, since the new paradigms would be made by ourselves.

During the last decades of the last century, in the field of creative thinking, the researcher Teresa M. Amabile, chemist and psychologist at Stanford University, has stood out. She is also the author of Creativity in Contexts, which is about how to create organisational environments for creativity. Her PhD thesis was based on intrinsic motivation as a key element for the generation of creative results.

What is creative thinking and who are the ones considered as creative people?

Creative thinking is “an act, an idea or a product that changes within a specific field or that transforms on that it already exists in another one” (definition by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Psychology professor at the Claremont Graduate University and University of Chicago).