There are hundreds of tools and techniques out there meant to encourage and enhance creative thinking.
However, here are 4 major strategies to stimulate you into creative thinking:
1. VISUALIZE : seeing the preferred future, the ideal.
2. EXPLORE : using metaphors, analogies or symbols to question assumptions and to jolt our paradigms.
3. COMBINE : bringing various elements together in different ways.
4. MODIFY : improvising, adapting, adjusting what you already have.
Each is created to jolt you out of everyday thinking and move you to think differently - outside your box.
Often we go through the day on automatic pilot, allowing our habits to rule the day, hoping for the predictable and avoiding surprises.
This can be good because we can become efficient and effective.
The drawback, however, is that our expectation of how "things should be" replaces how "things could be".
And this prevents us from seeing bigger, better, wiser, wider.
What creative things can you do this week?