When we begin with open-ended questions, those with first preference for associative processing find it easy to start riffing on how the question relates to everything else we’re thinking about, ever thought about, and ever expect to think about. And we easily remember ever single related incident from our own experience and the experience of every friend and every friend of friends.
At the same time, those with sequential neuropreference start evaluating evidence, creating categories, imagining chains of process and alternative chains of process, best case scenarios and worst case scenarios.
The distant convergence of these two processes is revealed at the beginning of references to Star Trek from either party.
There’s a bias that open-ended associating in the mind map style is the favored tool for generating fresh ideas.
However sequential step-by-step projections into the future can also liberate creative thinking. This is the work of contingency planning.
When we generate ideas using a mind map, we have people generate ideas from any direction, throw the words on a flip pad or white board, and start drawing the lines of connections among them.
By contrast, when we brainstorm sequentially, we may have a set of desired, or possible, outcomes. We put that outcome on a chart or white board as an ending point, put now as the beginning point, and start filling in the actions and processes which appear necessary to achieve the outcome.
As an alternative, we may pull an idea off the mind map, put it as a starting point, and chart how we build out that concept. In this process, we use if-then explorations at decision points to explore new possibilities.
Having clear boundaries and parameters can stimulate creativity. Robert Frost identified this principle when he declared, “Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.” Francis Bacon said pretty much the same 300 years earlier when he quipped, “He who aims at nothing will hit it.”
We don’t want to give up free associating as a creative tool. It’s important to remember creativity gets generated out of abundance and necessity.
Option questioning is an underutilized tool in generating creativity. We’ve looked at option questions as a tool for maintaining integrity when, in fact, our choice and resources are known to be limited. However option questions can serve as seeds to more expansive thinking. Opening a meeting with an open-ended question: “How do we want to spend our next round of marketing dollars?” seems expansive, but often bogs us down with too many choices.
As an alternative, if we open with “Do we want to spend our next round of marketing dollars on print or web? focuses us toward comparison and contrast within a binary system. It’s a quicker start.
Responses to option questions are more likely to tie thinking to specific details of relative benefits. They expand evidence-based thinking as one defends a point of view in contrast to specific examples. As evidence-based thinking is the domain of the sequential processor, option questions serve to expand our sequential creativity in a multiple dimensions. “What if” is a category of option questions that allow us to consider options that may not be present at the moment, but could emerge. What if questions can be contingencies: “What if the 405 Freeway is closed?” or opportunities, “What if we can negotiate better terms for our print campaign?” “What if we can focus our target more specifically for our web ads?”
As we know from computing, binary choices seem limited but expand exponentially over a short sequence.
We open up our most comprehensive thinking when we develop a practice of mixing closed- and open-ended questioning tactics together with option questions. It forces us to think across our cognitive landscape.
When we use a tactical approach to generate thinking across our cognitive landscape with a strategy of shining the light of context and precedent; authority and process into the shadows of our cognitive biases, we activate the full power or our cognition.