Creativity and Creative Thinking.

What do we mean by creativity and creative thinking? What do we mean by these two concepts about thinking?

Creativity, simply put, is the creation of something that never existed before. That thing can be an idea, a thought, a product or a process. Creativity takes place daily as we are constantly changing the world around us. Creativity can be used to make products, processes and services better.

Creative thinking is the process which we use in order to come up with a new idea, a thought, a process or a product. It is the connection and merging of ideas which have not been connected and merged before. Brainstorming is a popular creative thinking technique which works by merging and connecting ideas of other people with one's own in order to produce a new idea.

The creative thinking process can be used in two ways:

1. Accidental Creative thinking

2. Deliberate Creative thinking

Accidental creative thinking does not require any special techniques such as Brainstorming. This creative thinking occurs by accident or random. It can occur by a chance happening which triggers a thought about something in a different way and there is the discovery of a beneficial change. Other changes happen slowly through pure use of intelligence a logical progression. In this way it often takes a long time for products or ideas to develop or improve. This thinking technique is slow and in a competitive world is very disadvantageous.

Deliberate creative thinking, on the other hand, an be used or the development of new ideas or products or processes. Deliberate creative thinking uses techniques such as Brainstorming to to force the emergence of new ideas, processes or products. Usually brainstorming starts off with unoriginal ideas.

The development of ideas and products occur more rapidly using the deliberate techniques rather than by accident. Many people described as creative often use these techniques without realising that they are using them. This maybe due to not having any formal training in their use. 

Ongoing creative thinking which is the continual investigation, questioning and analysis that develops through education, training, and self-awareness occurs all the time. Ongoing creativity maximises both accidental and deliberate creative thinking. This ongoing creativity is time consuming and deliberate practise to become skillful at. However, it is suprising how it becomes an attitude and not a technique.

The first step to take is to learn creative thinking techniques so that one can easily arrive at new ideas.