Sunday, October 02, 2005

Lateral and Vertical thinking:

Every individual owes his/her success to his/her creativity. It is most useful in goodtime and essential in bad time as well. The main and crucial question arises that how can one achieve it? It is regarded as a magic gift of divine flash of inspiration, a chance coming together of extraordinary circumstances. It seems that one can do nothing about creativity except await it passively. It usually does come about in this passive manner-but only because we have never developed the type of thinking that encourages it.
Creativity is a “lateral thinking” type of thinking and it has been difficult to develop because in many ways, it is contrary to the traditional habits of logical thinking which we find very useful. The essential step is to understand the processes involved in creativity, escape from attitudes which inhibit these processes and to use methods for encouraging them. This is the purpose of lateral thinking, which can be learned as a skill and then used in a deliberate manner in order to achieve creativity.
Creativity is not only concerned with generating new ideas but with escaping from old ones. Continuity is the reason for the survival of most ideas, not a repeated assessment of their value. Such continuity can trap one into gross inefficiency. Freed from the prison of an obsolescent idea, one can move ahead. Furthermore, ideas (like organisations) which develop slowly over period of time tend to be cumbersome. With creativity restructing, one can slice through the inefficiency and put things together in a much simpler and more effective manner.
The huge effectiveness of mind arises directly from the way it organises information into patterns. The more firmly a pattern is established the more useful it becomes. But creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way. Thus the very effectiveness of mind in establishing fixed patterns makes creativity very difficult. It is like having a filing system set up to store data in a particular way. In order to pursuer cross references in such a filing system, one would have to develop new ways of using it.
When creativity is regarded as a magic gift, there is nothing that can be done about it if we are not lucky enough to have the gift. But everyone can develop some skill in lateral thinking and those who develop most skill will be most creative.
An understanding of the creative process is based on the way the mind handles information. The achievement of creativity involves: an attitude of mind, an escape from traditional thinking habits specific formats and techniques, and the use of a new functional word. All these combine to give the skill of lateral thinking. This skill can be learned, practiced and used. With practice and confidence lateral thinking can become so natural a part of thinking that no special effort is required.

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