Develop Your Creativity

Try the following activity, using the image below:

Cover your left eye and focus on the dot. Slowly lean in towards the computer, and at some point, you’ll notice that the cross disappears. Now, in the same position, cover your right eye and focus on the cross. You’ll notice that the dot disappears.

You’ve pinpointed your visual blind spots: the point at which you can no longer see something. And a similar phenomenon can happen with your creativity. 

Conceptual blind spots are areas you consistently overlook, often unintentionally. They’re the sort of things you should know about yourself but don’t. And sometimes, you’re unable to get your ideas past the post because you don’t realize that your blind spots hold you back.

You can start by thinking about your current knowledge.

Formal Education vs. Self-taught

Formal education teaches theories and constructs to help understand the topics you’re studying. Through books, classes, lectures, and seminars, you learn tried and tested processes to answer test questions and solve practical problems. But sometimes this formal knowledge can restrict your thinking, especially when asked to think outside the box.

Self-taught people learn experientially. They get to know a piece of software, a working process, or technical equipment by exploring it through their own lens and trying and often finding their own solutions. They may be more prepared to break the rules because they haven’t learned them in the first place. But they may not see a simple solution that others with more formal education have learned to identify.

Creativity often involves the unlearning of formal knowledge to enable the exploration of creative possibilities that exist.

Explore Your Creative Blind Spots

Try exploring out the following to explore your creative blind spots:

• Allow for flexibility in your formal learning. 

• Be open to ideas and suggestions beyond what you know. 

• Experiment with radical ideas.

• Allow yourself no constraints.

• Avoid one-size-fits all solutions.

• Face the things that make you feel uncomfortable (e.g., teamwork, difficult conversations, taking responsibility for mistakes). 

“Creative blind spots from formal education are very apparent in development/coding, where people who are used to using other people’s code, design patterns, or framework are quite incapable of implementing new solutions, like a middleware, without detailed, step-by-step instructions.” - Clara, head of code & design learning products at OpenClassrooms

“One of the exciting things about working in software development is things are always being reinvented. Let’s say you’re developing something using JavaScript, and encounter a problem. You might be able to look at the code of someone who has solved the same problem using Python, but you’d still need to figure it out using Java. At this point, you need to recognize that your learning is over and that it could be up to you to be the first person ever to solve that particular problem and publish it to the rest of the world.” - Mahmoud, CTO

Become Aware of Your Inner Biases

Research carried out by City, University of London suggests that most people don’t know how biased they are. In the study, 85% of the respondents said they were less biased than their peers, whether they displayed biased decision-making or not.

We all want to see ourselves as positive, rational, and logical, but a lot more is at play when we make decisions, and it’s often down to the implicit biases we hold. There are many types of inner bias, but here are a few that can hinder the creative process:

• Anchoring - relying too heavily, or anchoring, on one piece of information (usually the first piece of information acquired on that subject).

• Curse of knowledge - when better-informed people find it difficult to approach problems from the perspective of lesser-informed people.

• Functional fixedness - limits a person to using an object only in the way it’s traditionally used.

• Bandwagon effect - the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same, especially when working in groups.

• Reactive devaluation - devaluing an idea because someone you don’t like suggested it.

Remember, we can all have inner biases at different times and for different reasons.

Explore these by:

• Asking a friend or mentor to give you feedback on how you interact, behave, or communicate. 

• Taking the Harvard Implicit Associations Test to check your level of implicit bias.

• Being open to the opinions of others on your team.

• Challenging ideas you think don’t work, even if they’re the popular choice.

Complete Your Creativity Journal 

Do: Identify a time when you tried to solve a problem using a solution you’ve used repeatedly, but didn’t work on that occasion. 

Reflect: Write down what happened. Why didn’t your solution work? What could you do to find an alternative solution to the problem? What resources might you use?     

Let’s Recap!

• Conceptual blind spots are areas we consistently overlook, often unintentionally.

• Creativity often involves the unlearning of formal knowledge.

• We all have inner biases or knowledge that can create blind spots. 

Now that you’ve explored your blind spots, you’re ready to develop the confidence to share your creative ideas.