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ives and businesses he is also the author of thinkpak a brainstorming card deck a novel creative thinking tool that is designed to facilitate brainstorming sessions cracking creativity the secrets of creative genius which describes the common thinking strategies creative geniuses have used in the sciences art and industry throughout history and shows how we can apply them to become more creative in our business and personal lives michael s newest book is creative thinkering putting your imagination to work which demonstrates how to combine and synthesize totally dissimilar subjects into new and exciting original ideas thinkertoys the best creative problem solving book of all time chuck frey review by chuck frey during the last several decades there have been hundreds of books published on the topic of creativity but there s one book i turn to again and again for creative inspiration thinkertoys a handbook of creative thinking techniques by michael michalko i can still remember the first time i paged through a copy of thinkertoys at a local bookstore as i skimmed the amazing ideation techniques i found myself exclaiming woah multiple times i was stunned i had heard of a handful of the brainstorming exercises michalko described but most were totally new to me it was as if i had accidentally discovered a rich vein of gold shimmering before me here was the master key to discovering a wealth of possibilities and opportunities using clever creative mind exercises i had to have this book what riches await you within the pages of thinkertoys thinkertoys contains an amazing variety of unconventional ingenious techniques for approaching challenges from fresh perspectives and generating valuable ideas for solving them the techniques in this outstanding book are divided into linear techniques which allow you to manipulate information in ways that will generate new ideas and intuitive techniques which show you how to find ideas by using your intuition and imagination my favorite techniques include tug of war the phoenix checklist lotus blossom and hall of fame michalko presents these ideation exercises with engaging storytelling and whimsical illustrations that make it inviting and fun to try each technique the book over delivers on its essential promise you will find yourself looking at the same information everyone else is looking at yet seeing something different this new and different way of seeing things will lead you to new ideas and unique insights who can benefit from thinkertoys even if you don t think you re creative you re certain to get pulled into thinkertoys gravitational pull of fun storytelling and clear how to advice think of it as a toolkit that you or anyone else can use to stimulate your brain to generate novel ideas and solutions its content is eminently approachable this is not a dry treatise on the way the brain works but rather a delightful and informative romp through the world s best brainstorming and creative problem solving techniques these qualities set it apart from all other creativity books and explain why it has remained one of the world s most popular creativity books since it was first published the ultimate brainstorming guide thinkertoys isn t a book you read from cover to cover and then put on your bookshelf to gather dust this is a reference guide to creative problem solving that you re going to want to keep handy so you can access its treasure trove of methods and exercises whenever you re stuck for ideas i practice what i preach i ve downloaded it into the kindle reader on my smartphone so i can carry its thought provoking techniques and exercises with me wherever i go in short i strongly recommend that you make thinkertoys the centerpiece of your creative arsenal if you re just starting to explore the power and potential of your creative muse you ll find it to be an ideal entry point into a world of amazing possibilities if you re a seasoned creative professional like me you ll still find plenty to inspire you and expand your thinking in new directions one of the 100 best business books for all time to be or not to be creative reported by ceo read while readying the 100 best business books for all time for it s updated paperback release this fall we spent some extra time with the books we featured briefly in our takeaway chapter of the book expanding the reviews to include more detail it was especially fun for us to revisit thinkertoys by michael michalko not only because some of the content is reminiscent of those variety puzzle magazines found in drugstores that we all secretly and not so secretly love but because of it s applicability just as the subtitle a handbook of creative thinking techniques says thinkertoys can help those aforementioned folks who aren t the creative type learn how to be creative that s the important word here learn no not everyone is creative but creativity according to michalko can be self taught cultivated discovered you can choose to be creative and michalko knows a thing or two about getting creativity resistant organizations to change his website bio explains as an officer in the united states army michael organized a team of nato intelligence specialists and international academics in frankfurt germany to research collect and categorize all known inventive thinking methods his international team applied those methods to various nato military political and social problems and in doing so it produced a variety of breakthrough ideas and creative solutions to new and old problems after leaving the military michael facilitated cia think tanks using his creative thinking techniques just a visit to his website which yields an absolutely stunning assortment of articles interviews resources a veritable practicum you can also follow michalko via his blog on psychology today but perhaps his work is best appreciated in book form where you can scribble in the margins and bend the pages and carry it over to your coworker s cubicle to test them on one of his thought experiments yes make sure you have a pen when you are opening up one of michalko s books and we are all very lucky that he has a new one available for us to learn from titled creative thinkering in creative thinkering michalko challenges us to put our imaginations to work and believes with a great passion that everyone is creative or should be or can be it is as though we ve unlearned creativity we ve been educated to process information based on what has happened in the past what past thinkers thought what exists now once we think we know how to get the answer based on what we have been taught we stop thinking he explains in the introduction and then immediately proceeds to challenge the way you think with some mind bending games in this new book michalko wants to teach us conceptual blending which is the act of combining or relating unrelated items in order to solve problems create new ideas and even rework old ideas it is no coincidence that the most creative and innovative people throughout history have been experts at forcing new mental connections via the conceptual blending of unrelated objects and once again the material he presents throughout the book is entertaining but also so very do able through the exercises and insights in his books michalko provides the material to train even the most creatively blind how to open his or her eyes to their own and others creative ideas 19 sep the tipping point of america posted by imagineer7 in uncategorized leave a comment the japanese monkey macaca fuscata had been observed in the wild for a period of over 30 years in 1952 on the island of koshima scientists were providing monkeys with sweet potatoes dropped in the sand the monkey liked the taste of the raw sweet potatoes but they found the dirt unpleasant so they ignored the potatoes and ate other vegetables an 18 month old female named imo discovered she could solve the problem by washing the potatoes in a nearby stream she taught this trick to her mother her playmates also learned this new way and they taught their mothers too this cultural innovation was gradually picked up by various monkeys before the eyes of the scientists between 1952 and 1958 all the young monkeys learned to wash the sandy sweet potatoes to make them more palatable only the parents who imitated their children learned this social improvement other adults kept eating the dirty sweet potatoes and paid no attention to what the other monkeys were doing then something startling took place in the autumn of 1958 a certain number of koshima monkeys were washing sweet potatoes the exact number is not known let us suppose that when the sun rose one morning there were 99 monkeys on koshima island who had learned to wash their sweet potatoes let s further suppose that later that morning the hundredth monkey learned to wash potatoes then an extraordinary event occurred by that evening almost everyone in the tribe was washing sweet potatoes before eating them the added energy of this hundredth monkey somehow created an ideological breakthrough but wait something even more surprising happened the scientists discovered that the behavior of washing the sweet potatoes then jumped over the sea colonies of monkeys on other islands and the mainland troop of monkeys at takasakiyama began washing their sweet potatoes all the monkeys everywhere suddenly realized how to make the potatoes palatable by washing them incredibly it seems when a certain critical number achieves an awareness this new awareness may be communicated from mind to mind although the exact number may vary this hundredth monkey phenomenon means that when only a limited number of people know of a new way it may remain the conscious property of these people but there is a point at which if only one more person tunes in to a new awareness a field is strengthened so that this awareness is picked up by almost everyone the central idea is that when enough individuals in a population adopt a new idea or behavior there occurs an ideological breakthrough that allows this new awareness to be communicated directly from mind to mind without the connection of external experience and then all individuals in the population spontaneously adopt it it may be that when enough of us hold something to be true it becomes true for everyone this seems to confirm the concept of carl jung s collective unconscious and the parallel stories from biologists morphogenetic fields archetypes patterns or fields that are themselves without mass or energy could shape the individual manifestations of mass and energy the more widespread these fields are the greater their influence on the physical level of reality is it too much of an imaginative strain to interpret significant events in history as the result of spontaneous transmission of ideas could this for example explain the fall of the roman empire when its citizens became rampantly corrupt karl marx s overthrow of the czar when the russians lost faith in the integrity of their government the rise of adolph hitler when the germans lost their belief in democratic reforms the defeatism exhibited by the french in wwii because of their losses suffered in wwi is this what happened during the viet nam war in the beginning of the war there was almost universal support for the war but over time opposition to the war grew to the point when suddenly the population almost spontaneously began to demand an end to the war i ve observed a predominance of liberalism in the universities and consequently a growing dominance of liberalism in government education media religion community organizers law and labor is it possible that the universities have spawned the spontaneous transmission of liberalism that is transforming america from free enterprise and personal responsibility into the passive acceptance of big government controlling every aspect of our lives has the population reached the tipping point michael michalko is the author of thinkertoys a handbook of creative thinking techniques cracking creativity the thinking strategies of creative geniuses and thinkpak a brainstorming card deck his new book creative thinkering putting your imagination to work has just been released 5 sep how we were taught to think posted by imagineer7 in uncategorized leave a comment we have not been taught how to think for ourselves we have been taught what to think based on what past thinkers thought we are taught to think reproductively not productively what most people call thinking is simply reproducing what others have done in the past we have been trained to seek out the neural path of least resistance searching out responses that have worked in the past rather than approach a problem on its own terms educators discourage us from looking for alternatives to prevailing wisdom when confronted with a problem we are taught to analytically select the most promising approach based on past history excluding all other approaches and then to work logically within a carefully defined direction towards a solution instead of being taught to look for possibilities we are taught to look for ways to exclude them this kind of thinking is dehumanizing and naturalizes intellectual laziness which promotes an impulse toward doing whatever is easiest or doing nothing at all it s as if we entered school as a question mark and graduated as a period once when i was a young student i was asked by my teacher what is one half of thirteen i answered six and one half or 6 5 however i exclaimed there are many different ways to express thirteen and many different to halve something for example you can spell thirteen then halve it e g thir teen now half of thirteen becomes four four letters in each half or you can express it numerically as 13 and now halving 1 3 gives you 1 and 3 another way to express a 13 is to express it in roman numerals as xiii and now halving xi ii gives you xi and ii or eleven and two consequently one half of thirteen is now eleven and two or you can even take xiii divide it horizontally in two xiii and half of thirteen becomes viii or 8 my teacher scolded me for being silly and wasting the class s time by playing games she said there is only one right answer to the question about thirteen it is six and one half or 6 5 all others are wrong i ll never forget what she said when i ask you a question answer it the way you were taught or say you don t know if you want to get a passing grade stop making stuff up when we learn something we are taught to program it into our brain and stop thinking about or looking for alternatives over time these programs become stronger and stronger not only cognitively but physiologically as well even when we actively seek information to test our ideas to see if we are right we usually ignore paths that might lead us to discover alternatives following is an interesting experiment which was originally conducted by the british psychologist peter wason that demonstrates this att...