Q.How can creative thinking be enhanced?

Creative thinking can be enhanced through deliberate strategies: becoming more sensitive to problems and gaps in one's surroundings, deliberately generating many varied ideas, and using structured techniques like brainstorming. …

The chapter draws on research into the characteristics of creative people to lay out three practical strategies. The first is to become more aware and sensitive to feelings, sights, sounds and textures in one's surroundings, actively noticing problems, missing information, anomalies and gaps that others might miss — a sensitivity built through wide reading, exposure to varied information, and the habit of asking questions.

The second is to deliberately generate as many ideas, responses or suggestions as possible for a given task, actively looking for multiple angles on it — for instance, thinking of several different arrangements of furniture in a room, or several different ways of dealing with an angry friend. …