Let me tell you a story

Kids say the darnedest things. They come up with the most creative stories and ideas.

Adults? Well, many of us lose that creative edge. But, now a new theory suggests the adult creative deficit has a simple explanation.

Basically, we forget how to think like kids.

Instead, we're taught to adopt other brain habits that might be easier to explain in schools and business settings, but that aren't as well suited to the task.

It all comes down to the difference between two distinct ways of thinking through solutions to problems:

On the one hand, we have divergent thinking. If you've ever been part of a corporate brainstorming exercise, this is what you were doing, even if nobody called it that.

Divergent thinking is "ideational or visionary in nature," according to Kathryn Haydon, author of, The Non-Obvious Guide to Being More Creative, No Matter Where You Work. "It involves rigorous gymnastics of the mind that lead to unexpected solutions."

Compare this way of thinking to narrative thinking. This is the kind of thinking that you'll watch children do when they're at their creative peak.

It's more about storytelling; each point in the creative exploration sparks a jumping off point for the next one.

Earlier this year, authors Angus Fletcher and Mike Benveniste, who are associated with Project Narrative at The Ohio State University, explained the newer theory in the peer-reviewed journal, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

In short, they say that while divergent thinking is widely taught, "for decades, concerns have been raised about [its] adequacy."

But, they point out, while children are "more imaginatively creative than adults," it’s harder for them to use divergent thinking, because they're not as good at two key elements of that mode of thinking: "memory and logical association."

It makes sense; kids just don't have the experience and data to think through problems that way. But, they're still highly creative, because narrative thinking works so much better. 

The deficiency in divergent thinking is that it cannot "help prepare people for new challenges that we know little about," Fletcher argued. "It can't come up with truly original actions. But the human brain's narrative machinery can."

It sounds great in theory. But has anyone actually tested it, or come up with a way to teach adults in positions of responsibility how to think narratively in order to become more creative?

In fact, Fletcher and Benveniste have been using exactly this approach to train senior military officers at the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College, along with executives at Fortune 50 companies.

As examples, they encourage students to use the kind of techniques that writers use in order to create stories—literally to imagine developing new worlds in your mind.

Or else, they try perspective-shifting: "An executive at a company might be asked to answer a problem by thinking like another member of their team."

Accurate predictions aren't really the point, Fletcher said. "It's about making yourself open to imagining radically different possibilities. … We are obsessed with the idea that some people are more creative than others," Fletcher said. "But the reality is that we're just not training creativity in the right way."

Thanks for reading. Photo via Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. Want to see all my mistakes? Click here.