New Articles on Thinking Skills

It has been a while since I posted to this blog. Anyway, just to keep you updated, there are two my articles published this month which belong to the category of what I call "Power Innovative Thinking".

The first article published by the Altshuller Institute:

• Power Thinking Skills for Innovative Leadership

And the second article by the Real Innovation:

• Fantogramma: a Technique for New Fantasy Ideas

Both articles deal with the ways we think. The first article focuses on highligting certain differences between "regular" and "innovative" thinking. It is important to note that I do not mean that "regular" thinking skills which I mention in the article are bad and have to be replaced by "innovative" thinking skills. Both types of thinking are needed. What I want to stress on is that usually our innovative thinking skills are underdeveloped, and if we want to learn how to become creative and innovative leaders, we should understand what the differences are and how we can practically develop these appropriate skills.

The second article presents one of the techniques developed by Genrich Altshuller to help moving out of the box when generating new fantasy ideas. But again, it is very important that this technique is not only for fantasy or science-fiction authors: it can be practiced by everyone who is willing to develop his or her creative imagination. I also teach Fantogramma as a part of my training course on Creative Imagination Development.

Please send me your comments if any, I am open to discuss both articles to move further.

Success of Creative Imagination Development

Last Friday (April 27) I started a new series of training workshops by running a public course on Systematic Creative Imagination Development. It was the first public course of such kind given in English (at least to my knowledge) and it seems like it was a serious success: the audience was extremely enthusiastic during the course, and I received many exciting follow-ups. Although the course was based on the ideas Genrich Altshuller originally developed for Creative Imagination Development courses, it was considerably "updated" to incorporate elements of "power thinking", and the exercises were oriented at real tasks rather than a "free flight" imagination. For instance, a final exercise was to develop a scenario of a creative advertisement for a real business presented by each group of participants. The exercise included all what the participants learned during the day: principles of power thinking, associative search, elimination of contradictions, multi-screen system thinking, creative design principles. Although most of audience was not much familiar with TRIZ before the course, I was surprised how seemingly difficult concepts of "structured" creative thinking were quickly accepted and applied.

For those who missed the course, the next date is August 31, 2007, in Utrecht, Netherlands. The number of participants is limited, therefore it is important to register in time.