Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

Creative thinking on demand

Most of us regard creativity as a free-thought experience, where our minds sail or scuttle where they will and happen on ideas mostly by chance, with a little help from our subconscious.

And that’s pretty much what happens when you don’t have to produce an idea – or when the idea you produce doesn’t have to be workable. But what do you do when you need to solve a real problem creatively and on deadline?  

If panicking is your answer, Jonathan Vehar has a better system for you. Vehar teaches at the Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI) held annually for about 400 students – this year, June 21-24 in Boston – by the Creative Education Foundation. CEF, a 55-year-old institution based in Amherst, Mass., promotes a results-based method of creative thinking devised by co-founder, Alex Osborn, who was also an advertising professional and co-founder of the agency BBDO. 

  Osborn observed that people’s thoughts tend to go through six phases when coping with a creative challenge, Vehar explains. These phases include:

•  Identifying the goal or need (“gathering wish”)
•  Researching data  
•  Clarifying the challenge (what specific problem blocks the path to the goal?)
•  Generating ideas for solutions
•  Selecting and strengthening the best solution
•  Planning for action   

 Random inspiration may be great for artists, but for those in corporate situations, these steps provide a “deliberate walk” through the needed mental process, Vehar says. 

“It’s a funny thing. It’s kind of counter-intuitive,” Vehar says of systematized creativity. But in work situations constrained by circumstances including limited time and money, he notes, most people can’t just sit around and blue-sky for days. They have to produce - and the Osborn process offers a reliable, efficient way of quickly coming up with good solutions to the problems they face. 

Coincidentally, Vehar also came to the CEF method by way of advertising. An Ithaca College alumnus, he was working for an agency and fearing he wasn’t creative enough for anything but strategy when a secretary there told him about a creativity class she was taking. That’s how Vehar discovered the Center for Studies in Creativity at Buffalo State (SUNY) and the transformative idea that creativity applied to a lot of fields. As part of earning his master’s degree in creativity and innovation there, he was sent  to CPSI (pronounced SIP-see).

His immediate reaction? ” ‘These are my peeps!’ ” Vehar recalled with a laugh. “It was  just another one of those conversions.”

Actually, Vehar admits, part of that immediate reaction included thinking, “Geez, there’s a lot of wackos here,” because people attracted to CPSI’s creative mission range from hard-line business types to those “channeling beings from outer space,” he says. But he soon realized that the ones who seemed way out were, in fact, the ones helping him in his work by providing what he calls the “creative abrasion” that provokes insights.  

Vehar’s been working with CPSI ever since, teaching the Osborn method to students who tend to return to the conference again and again for ever-deepening instruction that emphasizes practice over theory in creative case studies of different kinds. He’s even started his own organizational-development firm, New & Improved,  to teach people how to work with one another to elicit new ideas.

Business people, researchers, educators, artists – no matter who the CPSI students are every year, it’s the experience of actually being creative, of writing, reading, moving, applying metaphor and not just listening to a lecture, that gives them results, Vehar says – “and “the reason that people come back here is that they’re getting results.”

Like Vehar, Mimi Sherlock is living proof of CPSI’s appeal – once a student there, she has become a conference teacher and creative-process practitioner who has recently started her own business, Sherlock Creative Thinking, to help corporate clients. 

CPSI and its program have “become a pretty important part of who I am and what I do,” she says.

Sherlock started out studying and working in food science. She became a CPSI disciple after her professor at the University of Nebraska introduced its creative-thinking principles to her and other staffers to improve their work in their cereals lab.  A few years later, the same prof encouraged her to apply to CPSI for a scholarship to the annual conference.

“I just had kind of a life-changing week” at the institute, she says. “CPSI gave me this whole other tool set. It was a really joyful process for me.” Eventually, she became an institute teacher. “I feel like I got so much out of it, I’m happy to give back some effort.”

The whole idea behind deliberate creativity is to increase the probability of arriving at usable ideas, Sherlock explains. But she’s also enjoyed  success with it, she says, because of the attitude the creative method instills: “It’s a very positive process – when you think things are possible, usually you can make them happen.”