Creative Thinking versus Rational Thinking

While preparing a new project, I have been wondering about leadership and management challenges in the innovation process. Some of these challenges seem to be conceptual and cultural in nature, the Creativity-Cat is just heavy to be lifted on the table ;-) My colleague Petri Lankoski fortunately borrowed  me a fantastic (business) book from Tudor  Richards (see my book recommendations).  Below are some selected  quotes from his book:

• Practitioners might pose the question ‘why is it so difficult to show managers that creativity is important and can be stimulated in practical ways by concentrating on creative thinking and problem-solving?´ The paradigmatic approach suggests that creativity is threatening to a deeply grounded belief in rational approaches in a great majority of educated people. This belief is reinforced within education in many technical and professional disciplines, including the most common kinds of training received by managers.

• Management is ‘about’ being logical and rational. So it is not enough to deal with managers from the assumption that creativity is ‘a good thing’

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• Normal or logical thinking and problem-solving leads to a predetermined answer which follows form the constraints of the situation. Uncreative thinking and uncreative problem solving have no need for self-discovery and learning. This distinction fits with the ideas from a growing body of writers challenging assumptions regarding the nature of management.

• Scientific management required logical and rational thinking . More recently it has been argued that such an approach assumes that the organizational system has well-bounded and fixed characteristics that can be defined. A more convincing assumption is that organizations have ill-defined characteristics. Management involves thinking in ways that make it a reality-constructing activity.

(Quotes from Richards, 1999, 21-37)

Comments

[Mikko Ahonen]

Double-Typo. My apologies to Tudor Rickards. I really should learn to write names properly %+( BR: Mikko