Creative thinking: practical ways to find new ideas

Finding new solutions at work, in study and in small business: brainstorming, brainwriting, SCAMPER, mind maps, judging ideas and a 7-day practice.

Say “creativity” and many people picture a painter or a poet. In reality, new ideas are needed in every kind of work: a teacher looks for a way to make a dull topic interesting, a shop owner wonders how to bring customers back, an office worker wants to simplify a repetitive task. In this article we look at what creative thinking is, the myths around it and how to develop it through practice. Then we go step by step through practical techniques: brainstorming, silent writing (brainwriting), SCAMPER, mind maps, “What if…?” questions, working within constraints and borrowing analogies from other fields. After that come judging ideas as a team and testing them with a small experiment, an illustrative example from a training centre, common mistakes, a 7-day practice and a checklist.

What creativity is and who needs it

Creative thinking is the ability to look at a problem differently from usual and find a solution that is both new and useful. Both words matter: a strange idea that nobody needs is not creativity, and repeating what everyone else does may be useful but is not new.

In everyday life, creativity looks like this:

At work. Instead of compiling the same report by hand every month, an HR officer builds a ready-made template.
In study. Rather than memorising dry rules, a student links them to examples from their own life.
In small business. A seamstress sews children’s bags from fabric offcuts and gets a new product.

Creative thinking is one of the soft skills: general skills that matter in any profession. It goes hand in hand with analysis: analysis finds the cause of a problem, while creativity multiplies the possible solutions. We cover working through problems step by step in the article on problem solving.

Myths about creativity

“Creativity is something you are born with.” Some people are naturally more curious, but finding ideas is largely a skill. Like a language or a sport, it can be developed with regular practice.
“It is only for artists.” Accountants, nurses and programmers solve small problems every day. Every new solution is a small act of creativity.
“Good ideas arrive out of the blue.” A “sudden” idea usually concerns a topic the person has been thinking about for a long time. Inspiration comes to those who are ready for it.
“Rules get in the way of creativity.” On the contrary, a clear task and constraints often speed up thinking.
“The first idea is the best.” The first idea is usually the most familiar and the simplest. Interesting solutions appear in the middle or at the end of the list.

Divergent and convergent thinking

It helps to split the creative process into two stages:

Divergent (expanding) thinking: finding as many different ideas as possible. Nothing is judged at this stage.
Convergent (narrowing) thinking: comparing ideas, combining them and choosing the best. This is where critical thinking and experience come in.

A common team mistake is to mix the two stages. As soon as someone voices an idea, someone else says “there is no money” or “management will never allow it”. People become afraid to suggest anything, and only the most ordinary proposals survive.

A simple rule: first many ideas, then the choice. Split the meeting into two parts and say so openly: “For twenty minutes we only collect ideas; we will judge them later.” The approach also resembles algorithmic thinking: first we look at the options, then we pick the most suitable route.

Collecting ideas as a team: brainstorming and brainwriting

Rules for brainstorming

Brainstorming is a way for a group to collect lots of ideas in a short time. To make it work:

Phrase the question precisely. Not “let us improve our work” but “How can we get young people in our mahalla into the library?” Write it where everyone can see it.
Set a time limit. 15–20 minutes is enough.
No criticism. No idea is judged, whether in words or by facial expression.
Quantity matters. We will pick for quality later.
Odd ideas are welcome. Even an impossible suggestion can spark a good idea in someone else.
Build on other people’s ideas. Instead of “Yes, but…” say “Yes, and also…”.
Write everything down. One person records ideas on a board or in a shared online document.

If the team gets stuck on one idea, turn the question around: “How could we make this as bad as possible?” Reversing the “bad” ideas often produces a useful proposal.

Brainwriting: writing in silence

In an ordinary brainstorm, one or two active people often do most of the talking, and the ideas of a shy colleague or a junior specialist get lost. Brainwriting solves that:

Each participant gets a pad of sticky notes.
Everyone silently writes ideas for 5 minutes, one per note.
The notes are passed to the neighbour, who develops someone else’s idea or adds a new one.
This is repeated several times.
At the end the notes go up on the wall and similar ideas are grouped.

An illustrative example: in a small sewing workshop in Fergana, the manager, Nargiza opa, asked how to find new clients. At meetings only two experienced seamstresses usually spoke. During brainwriting, however, the youngest seamstress wrote down the idea of taking advance orders for evening dresses for school leavers. She had been too shy to say it out loud.

An online team can open a shared spreadsheet: everyone writes in their own column, then adds to the others. For other sides of collaboration, see the article on teamwork.

SCAMPER and mind maps

SCAMPER: seven questions

SCAMPER is a way of “turning over” an existing product or service using seven questions; the name is made from the first letters of English words. An illustrative example: Akmal aka, the baker in a local mahalla, bakes ordinary flatbread and patir every day and wants to add something new.

S: Substitute. What could be replaced? Replace part of the white flour with bran flour and bake a bran flatbread.
C: Combine. What could be put together? With the neighbouring dairy seller, offer a morning “bread and qatiq” bundle.
A: Adapt. Which idea from elsewhere could be borrowed? Like milk delivery rounds, bring bread to regular customers’ doors every morning.
M: Modify (change, enlarge or shrink). What if we changed the size or shape? A small patir for elderly people living alone and for students, so the bread does not go stale.
P: Put to other use. Turn yesterday’s unsold bread into rusks.
E: Eliminate. What could we do without? Drop unnecessary packaging and make things easier for people who bring their own bag.
R: Reverse. Usually the customer comes to the bakery. The reverse: take advance orders for weddings and family gatherings and deliver the bread yourself.

You do not have to answer every question. If two or three good ideas come out of the seven, the exercise has paid off.

Mind maps

A mind map is a diagram in which ideas branch out from a central topic. It lets thoughts “flow” more freely than a list and shows the connections between them.

Write the topic in the middle of a sheet, for example “New customers for our shop”.
Draw 4–6 main branches from it: “Products”, “Location”, “Social media”, “Service”, “Partners”.
Write specific ideas on each branch: “Social media” → “photos of new products”, “customer reviews”.
Draw lines between related ideas on different branches.

Paper is the simplest option; on a computer you can use free online whiteboards. Mind maps are especially handy when building a content plan: the topic in the centre, the regular themes on the branches, specific post ideas at the tips.

Questions, constraints and analogies

”What if…?” questions

These questions temporarily remove the usual limits:

What if our clients are only free in the evenings?
What if we could keep only one service: which one would it be?
What if the customer cannot come to the shop at all?
What if we had to explain this to a ten-year-old?

An illustrative example: Zarina, who runs an English club in Samarkand, asked herself, “What if my students cannot come to class?” and came up with short voice assignments on Telegram for those who live far away.

Creativity within constraints

A task like “come up with anything you like” often leaves people stuck, whereas a specific condition gives direction. Constraints to practise with:

“Phone only.” Make a short video about your product without any special equipment.
“In one day.” Shape the idea into something you can test today.
“No extra cost.” Find a way to solve the problem using only the resources you already have.
“In three words.” Explain your service in three words.

Borrowing analogies from other fields

Many ideas come from transferring a solution that already works somewhere else. The question is: “Who has solved a problem like ours, and where?”

A clinic employee who has seen the electronic queue at a bank introduces a simple queuing system for booking appointments.
Inspired by the “bestsellers” shelf in shops, a librarian sets up a “Most-read books this month” stand.
Borrowing the “your turn is coming up” message from a barber’s, a training centre starts sending a reminder the day before each class.

Finding analogies takes a lot of reading and observation: books from different fields give your thinking “raw material”. More on that in the article on the reading habit.

An ideas notebook and conditions that help creativity

An ideas notebook

Ideas often arrive at awkward moments: on the bus, in a queue, just before sleep. If you do not write them down straight away, they are quickly forgotten. So keep an ideas notebook:

A small notebook or the notes app on your phone, whichever is more convenient.
Each entry gets a date and a sentence or two: what the idea is and which problem it solves.
Do not cross anything out as “silly”; later it may combine with another idea and become useful.
Once a week, look through the notebook and mark the two or three most interesting ideas.

What conditions help creativity

A tired, rushed or frightened person sticks to familiar paths. New ideas are helped by:

Rest and sleep. A well-rested person thinks more clearly. Write down a hard problem in the evening and look at it again with fresh eyes in the morning.
Walking and movement. If you are stuck, take a short walk outside or in a park; the solution often comes at exactly such moments.
Time without distractions. Turn off notifications for a while and set aside time to think in depth.
A team culture that allows mistakes. If mistakes are laughed at or punished, people only suggest safe ideas. When the manager openly says, “That was an experiment, it did not work, what have we learnt?”, the team becomes bolder.

Judging ideas and testing them with a small experiment

A simple matrix: benefit and ease

Once the ideas are collected, the convergent stage begins. Draw a large ”+” on the board: the horizontal axis is ease of implementation (hard on the left, easy on the right) and the vertical axis is benefit (low at the bottom, high at the top). Place each idea in one of the four quarters:

High benefit, easy: ideas to start on straight away.
High benefit, hard: larger projects that need planning; break them into small stages.
Low benefit, easy: small tasks for when there is time.
Low benefit, hard: set aside for now.

When judging, let everyone give their own view first; otherwise everyone simply agrees with the manager. It also works well to give each participant three stickers to place next to the ideas they like.

Testing an idea with a small experiment

Even the most promising-looking idea may not work in practice. Before investing a lot of effort, test it on a small scale:

Write down the assumption. “We think that if we do X, Y will change.”
Choose a small format. Not the whole city but one mahalla; not a month but two weeks.
Agree in advance what to track. How many people were interested, how many came back, what feedback they gave.
Judge the result honestly. If it worked, expand it. If not, understand why and change the idea.

This approach is also one of the core principles in the articles on starting a small business and marketing basics.

Example: a training centre team looks for ideas

The example is illustrative; names and numbers are made up. A small training centre in the Andijan region runs free computer literacy courses for adults, but few people are signing up for the groups. The director, Dilfuza opa, gathered the methodologist Bekzod, the administrator Sardor and the teacher Madina.

The question. On the board they wrote: “How can we bring more adults to our courses?”
Brainwriting. Everyone wrote silently for 5 minutes, then the notes were passed round. About twenty ideas were collected.
SCAMPER. “Reverse”: what if, instead of people coming to the centre, we went to the mahalla? That led to the idea of an open advice day at the mahalla’s local meeting place. “Modify”: instead of a long course, short single-topic sessions, for example “Using government services on your phone”.
Analogy. Sardor remembered the “bring a friend” offers in shops: course graduates could invite people they know to an open class.
Matrix. The “high benefit, easy” quarter held the open day, the short sessions and invitations from graduates. A mobile app for the centre stayed in “high benefit, hard”.
Small experiment. For two weeks the open day was held in one mahalla only. They agreed in advance to track how many people came, how many signed up for a course and what questions were asked. Illustrative result: around fifteen people came, some of them signed up, and most questions were about phones.
Conclusion. The team decided to hold open days in other mahallas too and to turn the phone topic into a separate short course. The app idea stayed in the ideas notebook.

Mistakes, practice and checklist

Common mistakes

Judging an idea as soon as it is voiced. Mixing the stages silences the team.
Clinging to the first idea. Do not rush to choose until you have at least ten options.
A vague question. “Let us think of something” will not produce concrete ideas.
Listening only to the most active people. Use brainwriting for quieter participants.
A big step without testing. Putting all your effort into an untested idea straight away.
Hiding a “failed” experiment. A test that did not work is valuable information too; write down what you learnt from it.

7 days of creative exercises

Set aside 15–20 minutes a day and choose a problem that matters to you: something at work, a study plan or a family business.

Day 1. Notebook. Start an ideas notebook and write down three small problems you noticed today.
Day 2. Quantity. In 10 minutes, write ten ways to use an empty glass jar. Do not judge them.
Day 3. SCAMPER. For a product or service you know well, write at least one answer to each of the seven questions.
Day 4. Mind map. Draw a map for your chosen problem with at least five branches.
Day 5. “What if…?” Write five such questions and answer each one.
Day 6. Constraint and analogy. Rethink one idea under the “phone only” condition, then find a similar solution from another field.
Day 7. Choosing. Place the week’s ideas on the matrix and write a small experiment plan for one idea from the “high benefit, easy” quarter.

Checklist

The problem is clearly written in one sentence.
Collecting and judging ideas happened at separate stages.
At least ten ideas were collected.
Every participant’s view was heard.
At least two techniques were used.
Ideas were sorted by benefit and ease.
A small experiment and a measurable result were set for the chosen idea.
The ideas notebook is reviewed regularly.

Creative thinking is not magic but a habit. Practise a little every day, and instead of “that is impossible” you will find yourself asking “how could we do this?” more and more often.

If you would like to learn new skills systematically with a teacher and a group, take a look at our association’s free training programmes. When you are ready, submit an application and our specialists will get in touch.