How do you think?

 

I have a really weird brain.

I am always thinking and have so many divergent trains of thought someone once described my brain as a spider web (I totally prefer awesome neural network, but hey, I'm probably pretty biased).

While I have come to enjoy the way I think and it most certainly has benefited my throughout my career, as I get older, maybe even a little wiser, I have come to accept the fact that I can't just go all unfiltered on people (I usually know this has happened when I get this deer in the highlights look from the person in front of me).

It's one of the main reasons I have invested in and spent so much time on my own self-development. From leadership, to communication, to coaching, it's important to me to be able to manage myself to create the best possible connections with my team and those that I work with.

That being said, it's not always easy, and sometimes it's extremely frustrating. Having ideas bottled up in your head and sharing them with others and not have them well understood is really hard to take. So if you are a person like me, don't give up, keep working on letting those ideas out, I promise the more work you on it, the better (and easier it gets).

That's a long introduction to talk about the point of the post today, which really focuses on creativity and original thought. While reading the book Originals by Adam Grant, I was exposed to the idea of conceptual and experimental creative thinkers.

I. Loved. It.

It was the first time that something really clicked for me with respect to how my brain works and why I have this core belief that things are usually much simpler than we make them out to be.

I'm an experimental thinker with a dash of conceptual layered on top just to make it really exciting.

To give you a really quick primer on those two types of creatives:

Experimental innovators work by trial and error, and arrive at their major contributions gradually, late in life.

Conceptual innovators make sudden breakthroughs by formulating new ideas, usually at an early age.

I left the "late in life" and "at an early age" in there as it was part of the definition you can google, but for me, I believe that these concepts can be applied a little more broadly as to how people approach problem solving in general throughout their lives.

By  and large, I do most of my problem solving in an experimental way. I take what I know, and from that what I think we can change or tweak to make things better, try, test, measure and repeat. Continuous improvement is a wondering thing!
I also feel that my conceptual problem solving kicks into place from time to time as well. This is more in areas that are newer, where I don't have a lot of experience or knowledge of the field, product or area and is usually something that comes from "why would you not just ..."

I actually believe that there is a cyclic nature to these two concepts, a type of yin and yang to them and their application to problem solving. Here's the key however (for me anyways), you have to not be afraid to fail.

Why do I say you need to be afraid to fail? Because I feel that for most people to develop and exercise these problem solving centres in their brain, experimental needs to come first (most of time); and to be successful in experimental problem solving, you have to be ok to fail, because you will fail a lot as you are testing different solutions.

As you build up more confidence, and you develop those creative mental problem solving muscles, your conceptual side can kick in because you probably have started to look at things different ... you probably ask "why" a whole lot more.

Don't be afraid to fail. If you have a boss that discourages you because you tried something new and failed, that's a bad boss, you are not a bad employee.