Research shows that we are more creative and solve problems easier, when we think about someone else or from someone else's perspective. For example we can think how a child would approch the task instead of thinking from our point of view.
Proffesors from the New York university gave students which were separated in two groups the following Problem:
"A prisoner is trying to escape from a tower. In his cell, he finds a rope which is half the lenght he needs to safely land on the ground. He splits the rope in two, ties both halves together and manages to use it to escape. How did he do it?"
The first group is told to imagine that they are locked in the cell, and the second group, that someone else is locked there. There was 48% success rate in the first group and 66% in the second one. In another experiment, the same proffesors told the students to draw an alien that someone else would describe in a short story. A third task was to think of presents for themselves, someone that was close to them and someone who they barely know.
The results were the same, no matter what the task was - the students were more creative and successful when they were thinking for someone else or from another person's point of view.
This is an interesting discovery that can be used to creatively solve different problems. To use it, just imagine that someone else has to come up with good ideas.
There is another theory that supports this. The theory says that it's harder to think of situations in which we are in, because we get too specific. On the other hand when we think from the perspective of other people, that are in situations that we do not know well, we generate more abstract ideas, which are closer to the creative ones - the ones that would help us solve the problem.
Lisa Bodel, CEO of the consultant company "Futurethink" uses this discovery through the technique for creative thinking called "Kill the company." She tells the teams she works with to imagine a competitive company, that looks exactly like their company with the same strenghts and weakneses. After that the teams must write down all the opportunities that would allow them to take the business from the competitor company, as well as the dangers of the situation. Bodel found out that this type of set up provokes ideas that are much better than the ones generated by the common strategyc exercises.
Just like the task with the prisoner, this technique generates the best result when we leave our own perspective and use someone else's point of view.
This way we generate more creative ideas and better solutions. Also it makes us leave our common way of thinking and after that everything is possible.
Next time you face a problem try one of these two approaches:
