Home / Manifesto
The thinking behind this
I am on a mission to make the world more creative and imaginative. The realisation that creativity is a skill and can be learnt changes your life forever.
Yet the majority of people still think creativity is a special artifact available to a few. Most people confuse creativity for artistic ability. If not artistic, it hides behind stories of Steve Jobs or Einstein.
There are business and industrial traditions that provide a framework for creative thinking. Methods like TRIZ and its derivatives, SIT and USIT, exist — but they are very much restricted to engineering. There is lateral thinking, design thinking, bisociation, synectics and many more. But the words themselves are uninviting.
So I want to strip away all the stereotypes, jargons, technicalities, and even the mystical glamour of creativity, and present its bare bones.
What I did is collect the ways in which creative people think, and curate them. All of these methods already exist in some practice — USIT, design thinking, somatic psychology, SCAMPER, de Bono's Six Thinking Hats, ethnography, phenomenology and other traditions. I have named them in everyday, common, human-understandable words, with simple explanations and examples from different industries and departments.
Creativity can wear a full-sleeve shirt, tuck it in, and have short hair and a clean shave.
It's time people stop thinking creativity belongs to long hair and beard and funky clothes.
My definition of creativity belongs to the baby who finds a new way to get the attention of her parents when her normal crying stops working.
The new tantrum is our innate ability to think differently to solve an immediate problem.
But as we go to school and come across the idea of one right answer and all other wrong answers, see only memory or logic rewarded as intelligence, and keep living like that for a decade or two, we forget how creative we were.
My effort is to bring the child back. To unlock the natural brain capacity to see different perspectives, connect different things, change the habitual ways of thinking, and use all senses to know the world — so that we are no longer limited to conventions.
Why now
Today people are afraid of AI, and the clear answer is creativity as a skill. When empowered with creativity, AI stops being a threat and instead becomes the most powerful tool we possess. All top leaders agree that creativity is the most important skill of the 21st century.
There is an added advantage here. Anyone who learns to use a thinking method can take the help of AI to apply it to their own problems and see the many options in front of them. It's fun to try. You can look for examples, brainstorm with it, and eventually turn this into an active habit.
The day it becomes a passive habit is the day to question this very method.
Finally, these methods are not foolproof. They require an effort of lifelong learning in a multidisciplinary fashion. Different types of content create the conditions for creativity. So learn the obvious, what's around it, and sometimes, what seems irrelevant too.
Wishing you all creative days ahead.
Alen Tom
Founder, FTS Culture Labs