Tools for Thought

Explorations in thinking and doing

Entries Tagged as 'Creativity'

Guest Post on LifeDev: Identify the Dominant Ideas in Your Thinking

May 9th, 2008 · No Comments

The title says it all. LifeDev has graciously posted my guest article here. It deals with explicitly looking for the presuppositions that frame how we view a problem or project. It also contains a few examples for you to run through as a lateral thinking training exercise.

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Tags: Creativity · Thinking Operations

Seeding Ideas with Random Stimulation

May 7th, 2008 · 1 Comment

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to idea generation and problem solving is familiarity with our own thought process. A problem, once recognized, evokes a chain of associations drawn from memory, and the strong tendency is to apply a stock solution that worked in the past for a similar situation. The existing ideas or solutions […]

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Tags: Creativity · Thinking Operations

Examining Trains of Thought with Flowscapes

March 18th, 2008 · 2 Comments

Flowscaping is a cognitive mapping technique pioneered by Edward de Bono in the 1990s that never caught on the way some of his trademark techniques and concepts have (Six Thinking Hats, the term “Lateral Thinking”). A flowscape is designed to give the thinker a topographical view of his or her stream of consciousness around an […]

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Tags: Creativity · Thinking Operations

Review: Catching the Big Fish

March 7th, 2008 · No Comments

David Lynch has haunted me for years. Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive are two of my favorite films. Where most filmmakers succeed or fail on their strength as narrators, Lynch’s films are streams of rich archetypes that transcend the usual demand for beginning, middle and end. A single frame may have more emotional impact than an […]

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Tags: Books · Creativity

Distributed Cognition

March 3rd, 2008 · No Comments

Distributed cognition lies at the heart of many creativity and productivity systems. It’s basically a fancy term for a two-step process:

Collecting thoughts
Organizing them

Collecting thoughts means externalizing them in some way, usually onto paper or computer. Once we get them out of the mind’s short-term memory, we create space, “mental RAM,” to have further thoughts more […]

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Tags: Creativity