CREATIVITY AND THE THINKING HATS

BLOG 5: CREATIVITY

Creativity is to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena and to generate solutions. It involves two processes: thinking, and then producing. The class was taken by Mr. Shiva Subramaniam who spoke about six thinking hats in details and how to use them when needed. It kind of reminded me of the sorting hat from harry porter movie which was a sentient hat at Hogwarts that magically determines which of the four school Houses each new student belongs most to. The “thinking hat” concept was developed by Edward de Bono who identified six distinct directions in which the brain can be challenged. In each of these directions the brain will identify and bring into conscious thought certain aspects of issues being considered. The white hat represents only information, what we know and what we need to know. The yellow hat represents benefits and value potential, the black hat talks about problems, difficulties, cautiousness and the risks we need to take. Green hat talks about creativity and idea generation, the red hat represents feelings and intuition and the blue hat initiate the thinking process, helps people think without arguing with others. The guest lecturer also spoke about the deliberate creativity steps; step 1: To define the problem, step 2: To find what is taken for granted, step 3: To drop what is being taken for granted, step 4: To think how to make the enterprise profitable and the step 5: To add the “taken for granted”. We need to have courage to break the patterns and vouch for new things.  The statement which startled me the most in the whole lecture is that empathy drives creativity. If we start helping others, we will start creating better things in life. I pondered over the statement even I came back to my hostel room, creativity doesn’t confine itself in the poems of Tagore or the paintings of Picasso, but also expresses through the work of Mother Teresa or that old man in our neighbourhood who painstakingly feeds the beggars from his old age pension.