101 Activities For Teaching Creativity And Problem Solving

this activity, you’ll be surprised at all you see. To break out of patterns, we must make a

conscious effort. First become more aware of your habit-bound thinking; then deliberate-

ly practice changing it.

4. Create New Perspectives

When I have arranged a bouquet for the purpose of painting it, I always turn to the side I

did not plan.

—Pierre Auguste Renoir

When the impressionist painter Renoir made this statement, he suggested the importance

of developing creative perspectives. It could be argued that there can be no creative product

without a creative perspective.To produce something new, we must see something new.

What we see may be some previously overlooked element of a problem or a solution

from combining two previously unjoined problem elements or ideas.

Two Insightful Thinkers

Perhaps the most well-known historical example of a sudden insight involves

Archimedes, who jumped out of his bathtub and ran naked through the streets, shouting,

“Eureka! Eureka!” This rather odd behavior followed his discovery of the principle of dis-

placement. While taking a bath, he noticed how his body weight displaced an equal

amount of water. This led him to an insight, or new perspective on how to determine

whether a crown was solid gold.

A more contemporary example is Art Fry, inventor of Post-it®Notes. He combined his

need for a piece of paper that would stay put when he marked his church hymns with a

scrap of paper that used a “failed” glue developed by Spencer Silver, one of his col-

leagues at 3M. Both Archimedes and Art Fry produced a more creative perspective when

they combined two previously unconnected problem elements.

Keeping Sight of the Big Picture

Not everyone can make creative connections easily. We sometimes get so close to a prob-

lem that we lose ourselves in it—something like the old expression, “We can’t see the for-

est for the trees.” In one respect, becoming deeply

involved with a problem automatically increases

our understanding of it. This is good. We must

understand problems to deal with them.

Too much understanding, however, can be

harmful because it causes us to narrow our focus

and lose a broader perspective. This is bad. To o

much detailed problem awareness causes us to lose

sight of the big picture. The solution: create new perspectives.

Each activity in this book will help you produce new perspectives and see problems

with new eyes. Idea generation activities do this by facilitating free association, combin-

ing problem elements, promoting interaction with other people, or eliciting responses to

various stimuli. In each case, the outcome is the same: new ways of thinking about a

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