Putting your imagination to work

                              By Bayo Ogunmupe

Putting your imagination to work is the subtitle of Creative Thinkering, one of the classics of the world's experts on creative thinking, Michael Michalko. This book is a wonderful manual on creative problem solving. Turn to any page, the idea machine in you cannot help but start manufacturing new ideas. The volume, a paperback, was published in 2011 by the New World Library, Navato, California, United States. Have you ever asked yourself "why didn't I think of that?" If so, this book is for you. In it, bestselling creativity expert Michael Michalko shows that in every field of endeavor, from business and science to lawmaking and governance, the arts and even day to day activities- our natural creativity is only limited by the prejudices of logic and our accepted tradition.

    Through step by step exercises, illustrated strategies and inspiring real world examples, Creative Thinkering will show you how to synthesize dissimilar subjects, think paradoxically and enlist the help of your subconscious mind. Thereby you will liberate your thinking and expand your imagination. The text has Creative thinking as part one. The creative thinker occupies its second part. It has 13 chapters, with its concluding chapter named Dancing in the Rain. It also has 236 pages, and within them are an appendix of 10 pages, notes on the texts cover eight pages and the index is of 10 pages.

    Michalko's purpose for writing the book is to emphasize the importance of conceptual blending in creative thinking in business and personal lives. Blending of dissimilar subjects, words, ideas and concepts is the most important factor in creative thinking. His topics include: we are all born spontaneous creative thinkers. How the thinking pattern we're taught in school prevent us from using our natural creativity. Why geniuses are geniuses and how geniuses use conceptual blending to create novel ideas. And how conceptual blending has inspired creative thinkers since the invention of fire.

Michael Michalko

    Conceptual blending allows information to intermingle in the mind; when people swap thoughts with others from different fields, it creates new, exciting thinking patterns for both individuals. Thus, nearly all technologies result from combinations of other other technologies with new ideas bubbling up. When you make connections between your subject and something unrelated, your imagination fills in the gaps to create new ideas. It is your willingness to fill in the gaps that produces the unpredictable idea. That was why the winner of the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics Albert Einstein claimed that imagination is greater than knowledge.

    We are educated to be analytical and logical thinkers. We are taught to make common associations between subjects that are related such as apples and banana since both fruits. But our ability to associate only related concepts limits our penchant for creativity. We form mental walls between related concepts and concepts that are not related. Just as conceptual blending allows information to intermingle, the same way it has inspired creative thinking throughout history.

    Similarly, when two dissimilar subjects are blended in the imagination, new ideas that are formed are not only greater than the sums of their parts, they are different from the old subjects. A classical example that illustrates conceptual blending is the story of the German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg who invented printing. His moveable-type printing revolutionized the storage and transmission of information. Sadly, academic analysis of creative thinking altered the concept of creativity.

    Pedants took the simple process of blending and by fragmenting it into parts and giving each part a different name, they produced the illusion that creative thinking entails several complex processes. Indeed, what scholarly theories best illustrate is our tendency to fragment subjects into separate parts and ignore their interconnectedness. Scholars try to understand what creates waves by studying just one wave, ignoring the others. This results in confusion, which creates a barrier to understanding what creative thinking is in terms of ordinary thought and language.

    Here is an example of how people think creatively. "Jake Ritty's invention is an example of blending two elements from unrelated fields into an insightful solution. In 1879, Jake a restaurant owner, was travelling by ship to Europe. During the voyage, passengers were allowed to take a tour of the ship. In the engine room, Jake was captivated by the machine that recorded the number of times the ship's propeller rotated. What he saw in this machine was the idea of a machine that can count money collected from his restaurant."

    Ritty was thinking inclusively. His goal was to make his work as a restaurant owner easier and more profitable. After the tour, Jake asked himself, "How can I get a machine that can count money?" Consequently, he made a hand operated counting machine. Understanding how Jake got his idea of money counting machine is understanding the process of creative thinking. Michalko believes man's greatest discovery was the art of making and maintaining fire. This is followed by the invention of weapons, tools, storytelling, alliances, gods, and civilizations.

    Anthropologists speculate that the ancients observed spiders weaving to trap insects. By integrating the skill of weaving from spiders and hunting, the ancients were inspired to weave nets to trap small prey. Change the way you look at things and the things you are looking at will change; that is the title of chapter seven. And we see things as we are, rather than seeing things as they are. Which is why we see no more than we expect to see.

    In his conclusions, Michalko told stories about human potential and the people who have had the courage and will to overcome personal adversity. Interlarded in the book are thought experiments devised to inspire the reader's creativity. He named the book Creative Thinkering, enfolding Thinker and Thinking into one word: Thinkering which symbolizes how both the creative personality and the creative thinking process are inextricably connected. You choose how to live your life. You create your own reality. You choose to be the subject of your life and determine your own destiny by transforming yourself into a creative thinker.

    This book will help you transform yourself, much as a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. While the author was a youngster, one day he followed his grand father hiking. His grand dad stopped and picked a caterpillar. "Look at this, what did you see?" "A caterpillar" Michael said. Later, Michael said that there was nothing in the caterpillar that showed him it was going to be a butterfly."Exactly," his grand dad answered. "And there is nothing in you on the outside that shows others what you will become. When people tell you why you can't do something or become something remember the caterpillar. You cannot see what is going on inside the caterpillar, and they cannot see what is in your mind. Only you, like the caterpillar, know what you are capable of becoming," his grand dad concluded.

    Michael Michalko is a world renowned creativity expert. His clients range from Fortune 500 companies to associations and governments. As a U.S Army officer, he spearheaded NATO intelligence specialists in Germany to research, collect and categorize all known inventive thinking methods. His team then applied the solutions to NATO military challenges triumphantly. His best selling books include  Thinkertoys, ThinkPak and Cracking Creativity. He is the  person that can help Nigeria solve her problems of poor power supply, dilapidated infrastructure and national integration. He lives in Rochester, New York. His website is www.creativethinking.net. He posted this copy to me from his home in the USA.