Our lives are full of cases of cognitive fixedness that prevent us from making changes, including changes to our careers. Some rules of creative thinking can help us see beyond the well-known and the familiar.
I have been working at SIT for 13 years, facilitating thought processes for new products and services for companies and organizations around the world. The invention of new products is a fascinating process, but just between us – how many of us get to dabble in it? How relevant is it to our everyday lives? On the other hand, perhaps we could use inventive thinking not merely for the development of new products, services and strategies, but also to reinvent ourselves?
After all, one of the major challenges of creative thinking is in the ability to overcome cognitive fixedness – the tendency to perceive things in a particular way, and the inability to notice their other facets. And we all have fixedness. We attribute certain roles to given situations or to their components and tend to be blind to other possibilities. The more we get used to certain presumptions, the more they become axiomatic in our minds, and difficult for us to abandon.
But our instances of fixedness are not restricted to our view of our environment; they also exist in how we think of ourselves. For example, we don’t like ambiguous situations. We already know what our own role is. We know what is required of us; we are acquainted with our responsibilities and know how to address them. But facing a vague situation, one where we don’t know what to expect, is no easy thing, especially when our career is at stake. I am not saying this to dishearten you. On the contrary: if you cannot predict the future, invent it.
