On thinking creatively, revisited

A couple of months ago, we wrote a post about our office dog, Maple. Maple is turning a year old this week, and,  for better or for worse, she is still overwhelming us with her energy and creativity.

In our previous post, we noted that Maple, in her quest to have her cake and eat it too (or in this case have her ball and eat her treat, too) came up with some surprisingly creative ways to approach the challenge. We noted:

Thinking creatively involves several skills, one of which is taking the tools at hand and finding new uses for them. Maple, with no thumbs, couldn’t pick up more than one thing at a time. Instead, she learned to use the ball as a tool to scoot the treat to a safe eating distance. A great exercise for keeping your creative synapses firing is to take some ordinary things and come up with unique uses for them. This forces you to forget pre-conceived notions about function and limit, and open yourselves up to possibilities beyond traditional paradigms.

We were reminded of this passage last week when we were helping out with a charity event. At this event, two local companies sponsored a party for the Boys and Girls Club at which kids got to go to Build A Bear Workshop after school and make stuffed animals for themselves. Now, anyone who has been to Build A Bear knows that their genius lies in getting people to spend $80 on a stuffed bear through the purchase of bear accessories. Most outfits start at $12, and then of course you have to buy shoes and bags and backpacks and formal wear and beach wear… you get the idea.

Anyway, the children got to stuff and dress an animal of their choice. As three of us were standing in the store observing, myself and two of the sponsors, one of the kids asked if we could help her unbutton a piece of clothing. It was a coat, like something you would put on a dog, that fastens around the dogs neck and has little places for it’s paws to stick through. Only, the person asking for help with it was holding a bear.

Immediately, all three of us, said, “Oh, wait, that’s not for a bear, that’s for a dog.” And the prompt response we got from her was, “Yeah, but I can use it as a cape for my bear, too.” Ah, how we were immediately humbled.

This little scenario is a perfect example of letting pre-conceived notions of “the way things are” get in the way of your creativity. Obviously, none of us adults would have thought to use the dog coat as a cape, but it was so glaringly obvious to the child that it seemed silly to her that we would even question it.

At some point in our lives, most of us stop thinking about possibilities. That is, we stop thinking about all the possibilities that exist without judgement. We categorize and assign, and while that gets most of us through hectic work days, it can start to carry over to our creative sides. And, applying judgement during the creative process, when ideas should be flowing freely, is the fastest way in the world to lose them all.