Thinking About Thinking: Enhancing Creativity and Understanding in Operational Planners

摘要

Creativity, the generation of new ideas that are both novel and appropriate is essential to understanding complex problems, and can be enhanced by both life experience diversity and cognitive diversity, as well as by delayed evaluation during problem solving, or can be inhibited by a lack of diversity and cognitive entrenchment. In essence, creativity is dependent on associating a wide array of novel or divergent experiences to form a new, appropriate, idea, however closed institutions such as the U.S. Army have limited pools of divergence from which to draw, relying instead on the commanders experience, which may provide exposure to many ideas over a lengthy career, but the ability to associate them into new creative ideas may be inhibited over the same time period. The same skills that allow a commander to be successful while solving routine or simple problems may actually inhibit his ability to solve complex or ill-structured problems. The importance of enhancing creativity is to balance the concrete specialized experiences, education, and intuitions developed in successful leaders with more abstract and diverse creativity in order to promote better understanding.