Why We Struggle To Think Creatively: Over-Inclusive Thinking

Kaizen Creativity: The Science of Creativity & Innovation

The labels in your head are destroying your creativity. The human brain loves it when it can classify everything into nice, neat, little boxes. It loves organizing information. This is what its good at. But this can be a huge problem for creative people who love combining ideas together. When ideas are too organized in the brain, we call it over-inclusive thinking. Think of it as the tendency for creative people to focus too much on what makes things different that they don’t realize why they’re similar.

Why is this even a problem in the first place?

Your brain is the most expensive organ in your body. It burns through far more energy than any other organ. The brain has an insatiable appetite. But your brain has shortcuts in place to make thinking more efficient. It’s found ways to burn less energy while getting roughly the same results. However, as creative people, this system can often be TOO good. We miss amazing ideas that are right in front of us because the brain is taking shortcuts.

There are 2 general shortcuts that your brain uses to make thinking more efficient: Categorical thinking and hierarchical thinking.

Categorical thinking is when we group things into categories. This is how stereotypes are created. Instead of treating each person within a group as an individual, we categorize the group and use it as a shortcut when deciding about the individual. The brain creates a label for a category so that it can use it as a shortcut later. This saves the brain a ton of energy, but also makes us sloppy thinkers.

Hierarchical thinking is how we structure information in topics and subtopics. On the top you might have “animals,” then under that you have cats and dogs, and under dogs you have different breeds. You can use the hierarchy to make very quick decision that would otherwise take a long time. If you don’t like dogs, then you automatically know that you don’t like Chihuahuas. If you know you don’t like a category, then you know that you won’t like anything in the subcategory, either.

These are shortcuts that make life easy for a brain that is already overloaded with information. These shortcuts are important to normal, everyday life. We couldn’t make it through a single day without them. Shortcuts work.

But when it comes to creativity, these shortcuts lead to over-inclusive thinking. Information and ideas are so well categorized in the brain that they never have a chance to bounce around and combine with other ideas. The categories and labels your brain uses to separate ideas from each other becomes the same walls that keep those ideas from moving around. So much of creativity relies on allowing diverse ideas to come together. We build walls between each idea to make life easy, but we need to break down those walls to allow ideas to come together to form something new. Creativity is often referred to as “Combinatorial play” because creative ideas often come from the playful behavior of combining ideas together. But we can’t combine those ideas together unless we first break out of over-inclusive thinking.

Today, as you’re creating, stay mindful of these shortcuts. Don’t rely so much on your past experiences that you fail to see the original ideas that are right in front of you. The problem you have in your industry has likely already been solved in another industry. Break out of over-inclusive thinking. Stop seeing other people or industries as totally different from yours. That’s just a shortcut in your brain. You can find inspiration for creativity anywhere, but it requires you to break down the walls that keep ideas apart

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