CREATIVITY REQUIRES CRITICAL THINKING

Many organizations are recognizing the importance of critical thinking for ensuring success in a variety of workplace activities. One obvious activity where critical thinking makes a positive contribution is decision-making. As critical thinking involves examining one’s evidence, seeking out more evidence when necessary, uncovering your hidden assumptions, and drawing the right conclusion based on your evidence, engaging in critical thinking will help ensure that you make the right decision and avoid costly mistakes. But there remains a somewhat common misconception that critical thinking might not be helpful for creative thinking. Indeed, many people still believe critical thinking may hinder creativity. Critical thinking involves following the rules of logic and rationality, and this (some believe) is the opposite of what we need to do when want to be creative. Creativity requires breaking the rules.

It cannot be stressed enough that this is a misconception. It is one thing to break the rules in the sense of challenging the status quo, or to think-outside-the-box, it’s quite another thing to break the rules of rationality. Breaking the rules of rationality means to act irrationally and this is never a good idea. Moreover, breaking the rules in the sense of challenging the status quo or thinking-outside-the-box or is not inconsistent with being rational or thinking critically. Rather, critical thinking is an essential part of creativity. The reason being that we need critical thinking to evaluate and improve our creative ideas. Furthermore, researchers from UC Berkeley and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales have recently shown that critical thinking is in fact beneficial to the creative process itself.

The researchers set out to challenge the idea that in a group brainstorming session one should never, at least initially, openly criticize each other’s ideas. This is a widely held belief. It's not surprising that it is so widely held. After all, it is one of the fundamental principles of brainstorming put forth by the father of brainstorming, Alex Osborn. Osborn held that by suspending judgment participants would feel free to generate unusual ideas. When it comes to brainstorming, quantity over quality is the mantra. What is surprising is that no one had ever previously tested this idea. Since Osborn came up with the idea of brainstorming over 50 years ago, organizations have been following this untested principle. These researchers showed, however, that the principle is in fact false.

Test subjects were divided into three groups. They were each given the same problem and the instruction to “come up with as many good solutions as you can to the problem.” The difference was that the first group was told to follow Osborn’s principle of brainstorming: “You should NOT criticize anyone else’s ideas” whereas the second group was “specifically advised to engage in debate and even criticism.” The third group was given no additional instruction.

What they found was that was that the groups who were permitted to debate and criticize actually generated more creative ideas than the groups who were told not to criticize. The groups who were told not to criticize did only marginally better than the groups who weren't given any instructions at all. The researchers concluded “the encouragement of debate—and even criticism if warranted—appears to stimulate more creative ideas.” This conclusion is strengthened by the fact that the same results were achieved in two quite distinct cultures (the U.S. and France).

It’s important to point out that the participants who generated the most ideas were not told to attack each other personally, they were told to debate and criticize each other's ideas. To effectively debate and criticize each other ideas requires critical thinking. This is why it is so important for organizations to not only foster an environment where critical thinking is encouraged but organizations need to be sure that their employees possess the critical thinking skills required to effectively debate and criticize. This will improve results not only in areas such as decision making, but as this research shows, creative thinking as well.