Everyone Can Learn To Think Better

Learning to creatively problem solve is not something school teaches us.

Creative problem solving is not a subject on many curriculums at kindergarten,
college, or university. Your people end up without the thinking skills they need.
You can learn to think better. Your people can learn to think better.

The brain is a muscle. More accurately, the brain responds to training very much
like a muscle. You pump iron and your muscles grow. You exercise your brain and
your ability to think grows. It applies to everyone. Anyone who puts in the effort
can improve thinking ability. Whether this is the same as innate ‘intelligence’ is
not very important at a practical level. What counts is how well someone thinks.

It’s also an untapped resource. You tend to pay for intelligence and achievement
when hiring someone. You benefit only from that person’s ability to solve
problems related to your business. Someone can be well qualified and lack the
ability to solve problems. They can also be poorly qualified and learn how to solve
problems that are valuable to your business.

Evidence shows that teaching people that they can improve their thinking will
improve their thinking. The belief that effort increases practical intelligence
encourages that effort. Providing the opportunity to learn how to exercise the
brain and the time to practise exercising the brain leads to even great results.

An experiment with students investigated whether training students to have a

growth mind-set would improve kids' math grades. For two hours every week for
eight weeks they taught students that brains are like muscles and that everything
is hard before it gets easy. They praised effort not intelligence. The brain-is-a-
muscle students significantly outperformed their fellow students. Some moved
from failure to excellence and sustained that improvement.

Read. Encourage your people to read. Establish a library at home. Use your
influence to establish a library or a book club or a book review activity for your
team. Many people have never read a business book or a biography. Give people
personal copies of important titles. More than a third of people do not read any
books. Read with purpose, make notes, share lessons learned, have authors visit
the workplace. It increases what people know and improves their ability to think.
It makes sense to include thinking exercise into your personal routine. Introduce
thinking exercise into formal and informal training sessions. Build it into meetings
– even routine meetings. Don’t save up your creativity exercises for twice a year
away-days or occasional brainstorming sessions. Use posters in meeting rooms to
list different techniques that remind people to experiment. Support puzzle solving
competitions, games consoles, brainteasers, crosswords, and anything else that
gets people thinking. This isn’t crazy. It’s crazy smart. If your people are thinking
then they’ll figure out ways of improving what you do and how you do it.

• Reverse conventional assumptions - What would happen if?

• Reconsider aspects of a product one by one – How can this be different?
• Create mind maps of ideas – How is one idea related to another?
• Explore replacing, combining, adapting, magnifying, or reducing something.
• Investigate the forces supporting and resisting an argument or decision.
• Look into the future – What will the world look like? What does it change?
• Expect good ideas –Ask everyone questions until there is a breakthrough.
• Solve problems as a group instead of slavishly ticking off agenda items.
• Imagine yourself as someone or something else to change viewpoint

As a taster, to give you ten minutes of brain training here are a few examples. Try
them, share them with your team, you’ll find the answers in the back of the book.

1. Can you make eight 8’s equal 1000?

2. If you stand on a hard marble floor, how can you drop a raw egg five feet
without breaking the shell?
3. After a woman was blindfolded, a man hung up her hat. She walked 50
meters, turned around, and shot a bullet through her hat. How was she
able to do this?
4. A man had a flat tire in front of a psychiatric hospital. While changing tires
he lost four of the five bolts down a sewer. He didn’t know what to do until
a patient spoke up. What did the patient tell the man to do?

Ask questions. Solve puzzles. Read. Think individually and as a group. Your ability
to solve problems creatively sets you apart. This ability can be improved.
References

Dweck, C, 2006, “Mind-set: The New Psychology of Success”, Random House

Dweck, C, & Mueller, CM, 1998, “Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children's
Motivation and Performance”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1998,
Vol. 75, No. 1, 33-52

Michalko, M, 2006, “Thinker Toys”, Ten Speed Press

Raudsepp, E, 1982, “Brain Stretchers”, Muller

Answers:

1. 888 + 88 + 8 + 8 + 8 = 1000
2. Drop it from six feet and the egg will travel five feet without breaking...
3. The man hung the hat on the end of the gun
4. The patient advised the man to remove one bolt from each of the other
wheels and use them