Think! Read Free Page B

And every one of her youngsters was completely deaf.
I have been told that Siemens (the largest corporation in Europe) has reduced product development time by 50 per cent by using my thinking.
    There are many such examples. I have written these things to show that there has been a lot of experience with these methods. They are easy to teach, easy to use and very practical. If nothing else, the books I have written reassure people that their unusual thinking is perfectly valid.
    Boasting
    William James is my favourite philosopher, because he was concerned with pragmatism. To paraphrase one of his sayings: 'You can describe something this way or that. In the end, what matters is the cash value.' He did not mean actual money, but practical value. What this means is that there can be many complex descriptions and theories. But in the end, what practical difference do they make?
    So the practical examples of the use of my thinking scattered throughout the book are essential, even if they do seem like boasting. They show that these things work in real life: in business, in education, and so on.
    I was once interviewed by a journalist who said that she did not want to hear about these practical effects of my work. You can imagine how useless the published interview must have seemed.
    A Canadian educator once declared that my CoRT programme was so simple it could not possibly work. I told him that this was like saying that cheese did not exist – because the method does work, with strong results.

1Creativity
    We need to look closely at the ways in which our thinking doesn't work. I will be covering a different area of our thinking in each of Chapters 1 to 14. I am going to start with creativity because creativity is a huge deficiency in our thinking habits. We know very well that progress is due to creativity: to looking at things in a different way; to doing things differently; to putting things together to deliver new values.
    We rely on creativity. We depend on creativity. Yet all we have been able to do is to hope that certain creative individuals will supply us with new ideas and new possibilities.
WHY WE NEED CREATIVITY
    The human brain is not designed to be creative. It is designed to set up routine patterns and to use and follow these patterns. That is why life is practical and possible.

We may need to use routine patterns 98 per cent of the time and only to be creative 2 per cent of the time.
    To show this, there is a game where you start with a letter and then add another letter. At each point, as you add another letter, a whole word has to be formed.
    Start with 'a'.
    Add 't'. The new word is 'at'.
    Add 'c'. The new word is 'cat'.
    Add 'o'. The new word is 'coat'.
    Add 'r'. The new word is 'actor'.
    Until the addition of the 'r' it was quite simple to add the new letter to the existing ones to form a new word. With the 'r' it was necessary to go back and completely restructure the use of the previous words.
    We live over time. New information comes in over time. We add this new information to what we already have. There may come a point where we have to go back and restructure what we had before. This is creativity. More often we are not forced to go back. We stick to what we have. If, however, we choose to go back and restructure then we get a much better arrangement. This is creativity we choose to use.
COMMODITIES AND VALUES
    Technology is becoming a commodity. Everyone can have access to it. Manufacturing processes and efficiencies are also becoming a commodity available to everyone.
    China and India are rapidly developing as manufacturing countries – and at a much lower cost.
    In a free-trade world the only differentiator is going to becreativity. With creativity you use the commodities to deliver new products, new services and new values.
    Creativity is needed to offer new values through new products and new services. Creativity can also design new and better ways of delivering old and established values.