Background

If you are anything like me you have probably said to yourself many times “I wish I was more creative” or ‘I’d love to be more creative but I’m too left brained’.

In fact the desire to be more creative drove me to spend seven years of my life researching creativity. That’s how long it took me to write my PhD thesis called “A cognitive model for understanding creative thinking”. It was a case of … the operation was a success but the patient died. It is constant source of irony and amusement for me that I wrote 100,000 words about creativity in a really uncreative way. In my quest to quantify the unquantifiable, to explain the inexplicable, to demystify the mysterious, I deconstructed it to the point that it disappeared. It was rather like the story about the man who, seeing an electric bulb for the first time and being fascinated with it cut it off to take it with him. 

Another irony was that having written my PhD thesis, I was even more steeped in ‘left-brain’ analytical thinking than ever rather than in creative thinking. If I was looking to become more creative I had failed dismally (or so I thought at the time). In my quest to get closer to the grail, I had inadvertently taken the path which led me in the opposite direction. However being a left brained person, I did experience a tremendous sense of satisfaction with the outcome. I had come up with a sort of a loose formula (a heuristic) for kick-starting and maintaining creative thinking.

I hindsight however I realise that it was all part of the journey. The path wasn’t leading in the opposite direction but was simply an alternative route - a route for left brained people, a route I would like to share with other left-brained people who may need a little help being more creative. The model I developed is called StrateGEE®. It is a holistic mental tool that supports the creative thinking process from conception to finished product. It is the basis of the creative thinking programs offered at Creating the Edge Training.