The six thinking hat

In this week Cathrine’s class (session 2), we continue to explore innovation and find out why innovation are so important to a city.

This topic of this class interests me a lot since I was born in a cosmopolitan city as well as living in one now (Hong Kong and London). I traveled regularly to China with my parents, to the less developed part. I love the totally different things in these places and it is always been my interest to find out why and where does people want to live and pursuit a creative career.

Important points to discuss after class:

1. ‘Creativity as a multidimensional process which requires combination of thinking styles’ -this statement is true in a very large extent. The fact that it is not that difficult to live/work with people with different culture backgrounds. The history and prosperous of the cities have successfully attracted professionals or people who seek new geographical opportunities. Whereas if you go to a less developed city, For instance, Zhongshan, a city in a prefecture-level city Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province in southern China. Seeing foreigners in the high street is not a common thing yet,  also a lot less labour are come from other countries too. However, major city like beijing and shanghai of course has a different story.

My opinions might have bias since I have been out of my home country for 7 years, the people and things evolve around me are naturally international, or conversely, I have already quite blend in to the a second culture.

2. Coming up with new ideas demand effective thinking. – This is a true statement and simply I think that effective thinking  help to pushes the ideas forward, it values up the idea instead of degrading it. Very similar to innovation, it prolongs the life of an idea by refreshing or adding new elements to it, so it adapts to the current environment.

3. Be able to switch through different thinking style (especially for international thinkers) – During the class we got introduced the De Bono Six’s thinking hat. A thinking tool for group discussion or individuals. It is quite common in the UK innovative sector. It shows attempts of parallel thinking which is very different from the ordinary unstructured thinking. In a group situation, it is recommend to think through the project with different hats, avoid individuals converge with the same ‘hat’ of thinking.

This class inspire me to one of the possible dissertation topics, where does creative talents like to work? Does different styles of management in different culture had affected their choice? Is it a advantage or a disadvantage for a creative team to have a international background? Apart form this, recruitment policy of a company probably plays a very important parts in this area as well.

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Filed under: Innovation