Nobel laureate Professor Herb Simon says that, in the basic physical sciences, "creative thinking involves the willingness to accept vaguely defined problem statements and gradually structure them, a continuing pre-occupation with problems over a considerable period of time and extensive background knowledge in relevant and potentially relevant areas."

Open ended problems

The request I get from 95% of my students is, "Prof, tell me what to do." They want me to spell out the problem, to define it. I give them vaguely defined problems in my classes deliberately—to encourage them to think more creatively. It doesn't necessarily make them more creative, but it challenges them to think in different ways.

An open mind

The first step—and perhaps the most difficult—in the creative thinking process is to keep an open mind. One of the problems of educated people, particularly well-informed people, is that they don't really have open minds most of the time. An open mind is important because we need to defer judgement. We make a lot of assumptions before we start solving a problem and, very often, we don't go back and challenge those assumptions. For most routine problems, that's not a problem. But for complicated, non-routine problems, we may end up answering the wrong question. So try to keep an open mind and to defer judgement.

Problem visualization

The second step is to visualize the problem. At this stage, we are looking for possibilities, not solutions. Generate options by diverging on the problem. Then you'll be ready to converge on the problem by getting critical, making choices and evaluating the product.

Knowledge base

I don't belong to the school that says throw all memorization away—you don't need it. That's nonsense. You can't look everything up all the time. You have to have a memory bank and you need some basic concepts before you really get into problem-solving. The question is when and how to use the information.

The long haul

To gradually structure a difficult problem takes a lot of time, thinking, reading and processing. We need a fair amount of background information and much of that tells us what the problem is not. Rarely does it tell us what the solution is, it just narrows the field of where we ought to look. In the physical sciences, this involves a lot of trial and error experimentation and wrong assumptions but we use that data to keep going. This is counter to the idea that exploring and producing negative data is failure.

Resilience

Regarding such experiments not as failures but as learning experiences is an important quality. When you work months or even years on something and you think you have it figured out and then it doesn't work out, you've got to bounce back. This is an emotionally difficult undertaking and you have to have a certain amount of resilience and self-confidence.

Commitment

Very often people have interesting ideas but are afraid of being wrong, of being challenged. We don't like to be bait and we don't like to sell our ideas. But we have to do some selling of our ideas—to ourselves and to other people.

Creative thinking is not the chaotic process that some people describe. To say that people who are creative don't follow rules is not correct. What is correct, is that they don't accept a lot of the limitations that other people take as a given.