Generally, the posts throughout February and March focused on creative thinking, and often, it's difference from strategic thinking. As a recap covering those nine entries, here's a review of the key principles.
If you're asking someone to be strategic, you're really asking them to ...
- Know and understand the (project's) business and communications objective, at whatever level is critical to the job’s successful completion.
- Have judgment abilities: to assess a piece of information for its intrinsic worth and develop insights into the critical problems.
- Know the available and potential resources, and determine how to use them most efficiently and effectively.
- Define criteria in advance of the brainstorm to select the best idea (if by no other virtue than it solves the problem or need).
- Measure their steps and final outcome to ensure the overall plan has/will achieve the goal.
- Develop a focused plan of action if warranted
A person's "strategic value" refers to how quickly they can assess and narrow down information to its insight so they may achieve a specific result, often through a measurable plan of action.
In other words: "Strategic people" look at information and ask: Yes or no?
If you're asking someone to be creative, you're really asking them to ...
- Be idea profilic - that is, to create as many potential ideas as possible - based on both the objective and insight into the problem.
- Not be prematurely judgemental.
- Be intellectually playful.
- Willing to take (calculated) risks.
- Express themselves – that is, to articulate both a) the insight from their knowledge in a way which others can acknowledge and understand, and b) the idea itself.
- Be non-conformist; they treat the status quo as another piece of information rather than a restriction.
- Seek ambiguity, uncertainty and disorder because this creates new and different explorations, explanations and experiences which creates potential answers.
A person's "creative value" refers to how many different or atypical ideas (both good and bad) they can create by harnessing actual or imaginary stimuli.
In other words: "Creative people" look at information and ask: What if?
People who are both strategic and creative share and leverage characteristics from one ‘side’ to enable the other. And most of all, one trait essential to both types of thinking is curiosity - the topic which I'll cover in the next several posts.
Finally: the answers for last week's 9-dot and 4-triangle puzzles.
Top The first - and most "traditional" - answer to the 9-dot puzzle
Middle The second answer (in red) to the 9-dot puzzle.
Bottom The answer to the "use 6 lines to make 4 triangles" puzzle. Think of the solution as three-dimensional, as if it's a pyramid with the fourth triangle as its base.
