Barriers to creative thinking
The main barriers to creative thinking are:
■ Allowing your mind to be conditioned into following a
dominant pattern – the mind is a patterning system and this
means you can be trapped into a fixed way of looking at
things, what de Bono calls a ‘concept prison’, or a ‘tethering
factor’.
■ Restricting the free growth of your ideas within rigidly
drawn boundaries which are treated as limiting conditions.
■ Failure to identify and examine the assumptions you are
making to ensure that they are not restricting the develop-
ment of new ideas.
■ Polarizing alternatives – reducing every decision to an
‘either/or’ when there may be other ways of looking at
things.
■ Being conditioned to think sequentially rather than laterally
and looking for the ‘best’ idea, not different ideas. As de
Bono says: ‘It is better to have enough ideas for some of them
to be wrong than always to be right by having no ideas at all.’
■ Lack of effort in challenging the obvious – it is tempting to
slip into the easy solution.
■ Evaluating too quickly – jumping to conclusions and not
giving yourself enough time to allow your imagination to
range freely over other possible ways of looking at things.
■ A tendency to conform – to give the answer expected.
■ Fear of looking foolish or being put down.
How to develop your ability to think creatively
If you want to think more creatively, the first thing to do is to
analyse yourself. Go through the list of barriers to creativity and
ask yourself the question, ‘Is this me?’ If it is, think about ways in
which you can overcome the difficulty, concentrating on:
■ Breaking away from any restrictions.
■ Opening up your mind to generate new ideas.
■ Delaying judgement until you have thoroughly explored the
alternative ideas.
48 How to be an Even Better Manager