As a teenager, I arrived home from school one day to find my pup in the middle of the lounge floor, shredding a newspaper into tiny little pieces. It was a big job. I decided to help him.
About an hour later, my mum came home from work to find the dog and me still sitting on the lounge floor, surrounded by ivory confetti, united in a shared mission to shred every square inch of that paper into tiny pieces. She did not decide to help us.
Why Me and the Dog Thought More Sideways Than Mum
Four years prior, I’d been abducted from my classroom by weird people wearing weird coats, who sat me down, asked me to find synonyms for the word “brittle,” then handed me four sheets of paper covered margin to margin in circles. They asked me to draw as many circle-shaped objects as I could. I didn’t shred that paper; I filled a couple of pages in about 20 minutes.
This exercise led me to an extracurricular educational program that focused on developing creativity and critical thinking. For two hours a week, they pulled me out of class and gave me logical problems, kinesthetic challenges and lateral thinking puzzles alongside a small group of other students.
Those classes delivered the most valuable lessons I drew from my formative education.
They came at a good time, too: back then, young people’s schedules were filled with unstructured play. Figuring out how to move eight kids from one side of the playground to the other without touching your feet on the ground wasn’t something you’d bat an eye at.
And while that exercise offered no tangible, real-world value, the neural connections and collaborative skills we were developing became an investment in our ability to deliver tangible, real-world value in future.
Adults Don’t Play. AI Thinks. What’s Next?
Creativity comes from your brain. Critical thinking is a skill. You can learn both. But as adults, we don’t permit ourselves, or commit ourselves to experimentation and unstructured play the same way we did as children. We don’t create the opportunities to explore without consequence that could actually lead to creative skill development.
In a preliminary 2025 study, MIT studied the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted writing, comparing LLM-assisted essay writers with brain-only writers. The study found that:
- Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks.
- Cognitive activity scaled down relative to external tool use. In fact, across four months, LLM users underperformed at neural, linguistic and behavioral levels.
Before we get too dire, know that the study used a limited number of participants (54), all located in close geographic proximity. Critical thinkers understand that those parameters mean we cannot draw sweeping conclusions from the study.
But it does make you think. Or, at least, want to think. And if you’re feeling inspired to use your very own meat computer, here are four ways to develop your idea-generation capabilities without AI.
1. Play
The concept of play extends well beyond Diner Dash, Crystal Crush and GTA VI. Play is about doing something you wouldn’t usually do in the real world, no parameters, just for fun.
Ask yourself when the last time was that you:
- Searched for a four-leaf clover.
- Completed a disentanglement puzzle.
- Rearranged furniture in your house.
- Went out in public wearing an intentionally horrific outfit.
- Fingerpainted.
- Studied the finer details of an apple’s skin.
- Invented a new word and dropped it casually into conversations.
- Learned to tie a new knot.
- Read a thesaurus.
- Shredded a sheet of newspaper into tiny pieces.
By intentionally exposing yourself to new activities and experiences without performance pressure, you allow your mind to enter a state of discovery, experimentation and learning. These moments are where creative processes can grow and thrive.
For those who decide to do something “conventionally creative,” it’s worth touching on pressure here. Play is about doing, exploring. It is absolutely not about outcomes. So, if you grab some paints and make art, do yourself a favor and lower your expectations. If it sucks, all you did was destroy a good piece of paper. No harm done.
The goal of this exercise is to build a regular practice of play, where you can detach both ego and process from the outcome.
2. Study De Bono’s Thinking and Frameworks
During this odd educational program of my youth, I discovered Edward de Bono. His life’s work focused on teaching applied thinking skills, based on the premise that the current education system was too concerned with logical thinking and its limitations.
You might’ve heard of:
- Lateral thinking: A creative approach to problems, tasks and design challenges that considers them from unexpected angles, rather than using strict, step-by-step logic.
- Parallel thinking: A problem-solving approach where one or multiple individuals tackle a challenge from the same perspective at the same time, rather than debating opposing views.
Other types of thinking include logical thinking (using step-by-step reasoning to reach a valid conclusion), abstract thinking (understanding complex concepts and patterns not tied to the physical world) and many more.
In a world where information is readily at hand, thanks to the internet, and we can simulate outcomes in complex situations, thanks to AI, improving our broader thinking skills is more conducive to critical thinking and creative problem solving than logic alone.
De Bono created tools to put these thinking skills into practice.
The Six Thinking Hats
The Six Thinking Hats are a parallel thinking tool. Let’s say you have a problem, a task or a design that requires creative thinking. Everyone puts on the same “hat” and discusses the issue from that hat’s perspective. Once you’ve generated a few ideas, you change hats, and so forth, until you’ve assessed the issue collaboratively and constructively from multiple angles.
The next step is to evaluate the ideas, eliminate the bad ones and refine or develop the good ones. (Note that generating bad ideas is a natural byproduct of generating ideas, so don’t judge them until it’s time to evaluate.)
Here’s the discussion focus of each hat:
- White hat (facts and data): Objective information, available data and identifying what you know and what information is missing.
- Yellow hat (optimism and benefits): Positive outcomes, opportunities and constructive outcomes of an idea.
- Blue hat (process and organization): Sets agendas, next steps and organizes the thinking process.
- Red hat (emotions and intuitions): Addresses feelings, reactions and gut hunches without requiring rational justification.
- Black hat (caution and critical judgment): Assesses the risks, potential problems, logical flaws and obstacles.
- Green hat (creativity and new ideas): Looks for alternative solutions, brainstorming and novel concepts.
The CoRT Framework
De Bono devised the CoRT curriculum, comprising 60 non-hierarchical tools across six modules, under the Cognitive Research Trust. Like the thinking hats, these tools are practical exercises that you can use in virtually any situation, from designing campaigns to earning stakeholder trust to deciding what to cook for dinner.
Here are a few examples:
- PMI (Plus, Minus, Interesting): What’s positive, negative and interesting about this idea?
- CAF (Consider All Factors): What are all of the influences and hidden factors surrounding this idea? What have we not yet considered?
- C&S (Consequence & Sequel): What are the short-term, medium-term and long-term knock-on impacts of the idea?
- AGO (Aims, Goals, Objectives): What are the key targets of this action or idea? What’s the goal? What does success look like?
- FIP (First Important Priorities): Which elements are priorities and which are not?
Note how many of these frameworks center around questions. Asking more and better questions is another excellent tool to develop your ideas.
3. Change the Question
Linear thinking suggests that better questions lead to better answers in a sequential, cause-and-effect chain where inputs produce corresponding outputs. Lateral thinking suggests that questions are tools to reframe the problem and explore the possibilities traditional logic overlooks.
Let’s say I have a task: finish writing this section. I have no outline (true), I’m winging it (true), and I don’t know what I’m going to write (also true).
Linear thinking might look like: What am I going to write about? → I’ll write about how to ask better questions → I go and write the section about asking better questions.
Lateral thinking might say: Let’s reframe the task itself through questioning.
Let’s give it a shot. Here are some questions:
- What might the reader want to learn?
- What is the purpose of this section?
- How might I achieve the opposite of the result I am trying to achieve?
- What information should this section include?
- How does this section connect to idea generation?
Let’s run with number three. The result I want is a section on asking better questions to get more creative answers. The opposite result might be writing about asking questions that don’t have any real answers. This is a creative challenge, too, but a different one from what we began with. Let’s pivot and see where it goes.
Consider the question: If you’re standing in a building, why is it called a building if it’s already built?
When you ask questions with no clear answer, or even open questions with several potential answers, your task shifts from retrieving information to generating possibilities.
In this exercise, you want to look for a couple of defensible answers (e.g., buildings require ongoing maintenance, so they’re never technically “finished”). Play with the possibilities. Sit on it for a few days; explore the idea with other people. Allow your mind to move in whatever direction it takes you. Generate more answers — good or bad; it doesn’t matter. Pay attention to the variety of ways you can approach answering the question and the new possibilities that emerge.
Asking new questions is an excellent way to generate ideas and reframe the problem. Through those questions, you might even find a different path to the finish line.
4. Steal Other People’s Thinking Processes
Exploring ideas with people is fascinating, not always because of the answers, but because you have the opportunity to learn about how someone else thinks.
When you talk about the same idea with five different people, you’ll meet five different thinking frameworks. Explore the processes and structures behind their answers by asking open questions:
- Why do you say that?
- What would happen if…
- How do you think [un/related point] would influence that?
- What does that mean for you?
Notice how values, emotions, knowledge and experience all influence the thought process in different ways for different people, demonstrating how malleable thinking really is. If you discover a process that could add value to your thinking, steal it. Practice it. Use it.
Here’s an example:
Question: What’s your favorite word, and why?
- Answer 1: Flower, because I like gardening.
- Answer 2: Sesquipedalia, because it’s a self-descriptive word.
- Answer 3: Morose, because I like the way it sounds and how it feels to say it.
Each of these responses involved different thought processes. The first is associative thinking, the second is metacognitive and the third is sensory. Each type of thinking can add value in a broad range of contexts.
Another example: comparative thinking. Let’s say you need to design a new table. To generate ideas, find a mundane object like a paperclip. Examine the two objects’ similarities and differences and see what you come up with:
- You can bend paperclips → Design a versatile table with bendy legs so you can adjust the height and shape.
- Paperclips have a hole in the middle → Design a table that extends all around the person. You sit in the middle and have 360-degree tabletop space.
- Paperclips have a curly shape → Design a long, curved table that wraps around in a paper-clip shape so office workers can easily set up for group collaboration or independent work from the same desk, depending on needs.
When you can challenge, adapt, refine, diversify and develop your own thinking, you’ll have a much sharper toolset to generate better ideas to solve more complex problems. Other people are excellent teachers for that.
But remember, steal the process, not the idea.
Developing Creativity Is a Choice
Nurturing your idea-generation skills is a harmless, intriguing, rinse-and-repeat process, and it begins only when you decide to do it. So, have a think. How can you play? What material tools are available? Which questions could you ask? What’s the best way to find out whose processes are worth stealing?
Experiment. Express. Interrogate. And don’t ever be afraid to destroy a perfectly good piece of paper.
