Case StudiesVarious One-offs (by genre)
**Disclaimer** I did not write or compile the information below. I came across this breakdown years ago on a website called SessionLab, written by James Smart. It really struck a chord with me, and the information has come up countless times in conversations around the essence of creative thinking. Because of that, I wanted to extract the highlights, distill the points down to their core, and be able to share/reference them with others. Please feel free to also share this information with people in your life if you think it could offer up a fresh perspective!
Creative thinking is the ability to approach a problem or
challenge from a new perspective, alternative angle, or with an atypical
mindset. This might mean thinking outside of the box, taking
techniques from one discipline and applying them to another, or simply
creating space for new ideas and alternative solutions to present
themselves through dialogue, experimentation, or reflection.
Bear
in mind that the number of different creative approaches is as vast as
the number of creative thinkers – if an approach helps you see things
differently and approaching a challenge creatively, follow that impulse.
While
there are some proven methods and guidelines that can help you be a
better creative thinker, remember that everyone can be creative and finding what works for you is what is important, not the terminology or specific framework.
One
misapprehension about creative thinking is that you have to be skilled
at more traditional creative skills like drawing or writing. This isn’t
true. What’s important is that you are open to exploring alternative solutions while employing fresh techniques and creative approaches to what you’re working on.
You don’t need to be a great artist or even work in a traditionally creative field – we believe everyone is capable of creative thinking and that it enriches your personal and professional lives when you learn to be more creative.
Another
misconception about creative thinking is that it applies only to the
ideation or technically creative parts of the process. All aspects of our lives and interactions with people and challenges can benefit from creative thinking – from the ability to see things differently.
Experimentation is the willingness to try new things, start projects without overthinking, and learn through action. Good experimenters make informed decisions, test ideas, and stay open to imperfect results. Like a designer or painter freely trying new techniques, you don’t need every attempt to succeed; each experiment generates insight and can spark better solutions.
At the same time, experimentation works best within a clear process. Documenting what you try and what happens ensures you can refine, iterate, and reproduce strong outcomes. Creative freedom paired with good tracking turns experimentation into a powerful engine for growth and new ideas.
Open-mindedness speaks to the ability to stay receptive to new ideas, unfamiliar perspectives, and ways of thinking that differ from your own. It means resisting the urge to shut ideas down too quickly and instead exploring where they come from.
When a colleague or client offers something unconventional, open-mindedness invites you to understand their thinking before judging it. Their idea may not be perfect, but this willingness to engage creates dialogue, supports collaboration, and can lead to stronger creative outcomes.
At the same time, being open-minded doesn’t mean accepting everything uncritically. It’s about balancing openness with thoughtful evaluation so you stay receptive without losing your own perspective.
Lateral thinking is a key creative skill that helps you solve problems by looking beyond the obvious and using non-traditional logic. Instead of relying only on direct or conventional solutions, lateral thinking asks you to step back, reframe the challenge, and explore indirect paths - like updating your portfolio to attract better-fit clients, refining your onboarding process to reduce revision rounds,
or creating reusable design systems to speed up workflows, rather than simply increasing your hours.
This approach expands your options and can uncover more effective routes forward. But not every problem needs an unconventional fix - sometimes the simplest answer is still the best. Use lateral thinking selectively, pairing creativity with clear judgment so you don’t reinvent the wheel unnecessarily.
Pattern recognition is the skill of noticing meaningful connections (both obvious and hidden) and using them to better understand situations. While rooted in our earliest survival instincts, recognizing less-visible patterns is a powerful modern creative tool.
For example, if a client shares multiple inspirational images that don’t immediately align, it may seem confusing. By looking for subtle consistencies in mood, color palettes, or imagery style, you can detect patterns that reveal their true aesthetic preferences and inform your design direction, as well as the creative language they’re trying to speak to you.
Another instance could be if multiple clients keep requesting major revisions, it might seem like each project is just difficult - but looking deeper could reveal a pattern, like unclear briefs, misaligned expectations, or gaps in your discovery process. Spotting these subtler patterns helps you adjust your workflow and create smoother, more successful projects.
At the same time, stay aware of your own biases. It’s easy to force events into a pattern you expect. Interpreting information honestly ensures any patterns you identify are real, useful, and creatively productive.
Deep or active listening is a key creative skill - it’s more than just hearing words; it’s engaging with the intent, perspective, and underlying reasons behind what’s being said. This allows you to reframe thinking, uncover new insights, and foster more productive conversations.
For example, in a client roadblock, actively listening to all sides helps you understand core issues and identify creative solutions that address everyone’s needs, rather than missing key concerns, making people feel unheard, or even allowing your own creative ego to cloud a new path to success.
This skill transforms communication into a tool for clearer thinking and more innovative problem-solving.
Challenging norms fuels creativity by encouraging you to question the status quo and explore new, potentially better approaches. Innovation comes from thoughtfully pushing beyond established methods while remaining respectful of existing work.
Focus on evaluating which norms genuinely limit progress and challenge them selectively, balancing curiosity with practical judgment to create meaningful improvements.
You can practice this skill by evaluating current frameworks and asking if there’s a more effective approach, while being selective about which norms truly need challenging. Constructive, thoughtful questioning of existing work drives growth without unnecessary conflict.
Lean organization is key - it’s about staying organized without unnecessary complexity, focusing only on what’s essential to get things done.
A large project team might skip traditional, frequent meetings in favor of more efficient ways to stay aligned.
It could also mean streamlining client communication and project management (using a single task board, templated emails, or batch-scheduling invoices) so you focus on design rather than juggling unnecessary admin. This creates more space for creativity while keeping projects on track. Keeping a minimalist file system and clearly naming assets, so you can quickly find what you need and spend more time designing rather than searching through clutter - this is the power of lean organization.
Thinking creatively about structure, processes, and priorities helps both leaders and teams work more effectively while leaving space for innovation.
Simplicity is the ability to identify what’s essential and remove unnecessary complexity. Simplifying allows you to reframe large or complex problems in a way that makes them more approachable and actionable.
For a designer, simplicity might mean presenting a client with a concise set of design options instead of dozens of variations. By highlighting the most impactful choices, you make it easier for the client to decide and keep the project moving efficiently, while ensuring your creative vision remains clear.
Any major project requires some measure of planning in order to
succeed, especially when working with others. But are there times where
overplanning or traditional working processes feel too slow or
frustrating for the project at hand? This is where these creative
thinking skills come in handy! Radical planning is a way of
approaching project planning from an alternative angle in order to
generate fast, effective results.
When taking this planning approach, you
will often shuffle the order of the normal planning process in order to
create alternative outcomes and cut out elements you may not need. For example, with the backcasting workshop activity, the approach is to think of desired outcomes up to
twenty years in the future and work backward to figure out how we can
make small steps today.
You might also try planning with a mindset
of what you and your team can each achieve immediately and in a more
experimental fashion with an activity like 15% solutions.
By
approaching planning with a creative thinking mindset, you can surface
ideas and plans which may not have come up with a more traditional
planning process. Another great benefit is to question the
normal manner in which your team or organisation approaches planning and
can help your team find a method that works best for you!
Effective collaboration requires us to bring many different skills
together, but consciously considering how to be a more effective
collaborator is worth mentioning separately. When a creative thinker
approaches collaboration, they will try to think of how to use alternative approaches to make the collaborative process more effective while also helping everyone on the team contribute and be heard.
An
example is when it comes to getting work done in meetings – if the
current process isn’t enabling everyone to collaborate effectively, you
might employ creative thinking to try finding an alternative format,
consider working asynchronously, or timeboxing parts of your agenda.
The
best collaborators also find ways to champion the work of others and
create a safe space for everyone to contribute – it might not be enough
to assume collaboration will be accomplished when you get people in a
room.
Employing this creative thinking skill can make all the difference when it comes to job satisfaction, interpersonal relationships and group outcomes too! Try approaching your collaborative projects more mindfully and see how it changes things for you!
Collecting data might seem like a solely analytical skill, but it is
another area where creative thinking can lead to productive, unexpected
and transformative results. Approaching the data collection
process creatively might mean trying new techniques or sources, or
simply reconsidering the how and why of your data collection processes.
Imagine
you are running a survey to measure customer happiness. You might try
asking traditional survey questions, but find that your response rate is
low and furthermore, your approach might be invasive and actively
decrease happiness too!
If you were to approach this problem
creatively, you might find that using a simplified form, asking for
feedback at a different point in the customer journey, or utilizing an
alternative measurement scheme delivers the data you are looking for. In
many cases, thinking about the questions you are asking from a new
point of view is what unlocks a better data collection process.
The key to this creative thinking skill is to
try looking at the data collection process from a new, preferably
customer-centric perspective while also considering why and how you are
collecting data. You will likely find that by asking for input
from your customers more creatively, you create space for more creative
responses too!
Interpretation skills can be varied though in a creative thinking
context it means being able to successfully analyze an idea, solution,
dataset, or conversation and draw effective conclusions. Great
interpreters are people with a desire to listen, understand, and dig
deeper in order to make their interpretation fully realised.
One
of the ways creative thinking can improve interpretation is in helping
us challenge assumptions or initial readings of data in order to
consider other possible interpretations and perspectives.
Say your
product is having a problem with losing lots of new customers shortly
after signing up. You do a survey and people say that they leave because
the product isn’t useful to them. Your initial interpretation of that
data might be that you’re not the right fit for these customers or that
the product needs new features.
If you were to apply creative
thinking to the interpretation of this data, you might conduct further
research and see that the product is fine, but people didn’t find the
right features for them and that your onboarding process needs to be
improved.
The key here is interpreting the data from
various perspectives and then correlating that with other sources to
form an accurate and representative interpretation, rather than going
with your initial assumption. By following this process, you
might also find that the way you are collecting data is flawed (perhaps
not asking the right questions) or that more research and data
collection is needed.
So long as you are sure to have data points
and analysis to back up your findings, it pays to explore alternative
interpretations so you can avoid bias and find the most accurate takeaways.
Einstein is quoted as saying, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” In this mold, sometimes the best ideas and solutions come from fields and disciplines outside of our own.
By considering how someone with a different skillset to your own would
solve a problem or deploy solutions, you can often find ideas and
techniques you may never have considered.
Consider being tasked
with improving employee happiness. A social media manager with a
background in illustration and events management would likely try a very
different approach to a sales manager who is used to a culture of
incentives and bonuses. If you were trying to develop a new product,
think of how a developer would approach deciding on key features versus
an academic or a customer success manager?
The important thing here is to try and use the perspective, skill set, and approach of another field or discipline to first consider and then solve a problem more fully. Where possible, try and include people from other disciplines in the process and try to avoid making assumptions.
As
with all creative thinking skills, being open-minded and sourcing the
expertise and opinions of others where necessary is vital when creating
true innovation.
All creative thinking skills are about reframing things in a new way
of finding alternative approaches. This can often mean abandoning an
existing framework and thinking outside of the box. That said, another way of applying creative thinking is by bringing rulesets, constraints, or frameworks to your approach in order to trigger deeper creative work and tap into a problem-solving mindset.
Consider
a simple task like trying to generate more customers. With free reign,
there are innumerable ways to accomplish this. But what happens if you
create a rule like, we cannot spend any money, or, these must be driven
by social media alone. In order to accomplish your goal under these conditions, you must think more creatively and deeply, deploying more concentrated problem-solving skills than if you could try any approach you wanted.
Alternatively,
you might approach a problem with a framework that forces you to think
under specific circumstances or with a rigid set of steps. Six thinking hats is a great workshop activity that asks participants to frame and reframe a problem from six different angles. While it might first seem counterintuitive, the use of rules or frameworks can create fertile ground for creative thinking and lead to more realized solutions!
Not all problems are created equal. Depending on how much it
directly affects you, you might see a given problem as being more or
less important than your colleagues, leading to a different response and
approach to solving the problem. This creative thinking skill is all
about being able to switch between seeing the bigger picture while also considering how something might manifest on a smaller scale.
Think
of how frustrating it can be when an executive team makes sweeping
changes that affect frontline staff in a way they might not have
anticipated. Micro and macro thinking means seeing both problems
and potential solutions from multiple perspectives and adjusting
accordingly.
Another key aspect of applying this approach is knowing the limits of your own knowledge and involving stakeholders from all levels of an organization to inform your ideation and problem-solving process.
If
you’ve never worked in support and don’t regularly talk to your support
team, you might not understand how a change to helpdesk software could
impact your team and your clients – remember that a big part of any change in perspective is doing the research and talking to who will be affected!
Learning
to practice micro and macro thinking often starts with first listening
to and understanding the needs and perspectives of others. Especially those who have varied positions in relation to the problem, solutions, or organization you are working with.
Of all the creative thinking skills on this list, visual thinking might be one you are most familiar with. Visual thinking is a method of processing, learning, and presenting information and concepts with visual assets such as images.
Visual
thinking is often associated with creative thinking because of the
consumption and creation of images at its heart. Don’t let this make you
think you have to be able to draw in order to be a visual thinker.
Applying
this creative thinking skill means being able to interpret visual
information, present concepts in an often simple visual manner, and
communicate in a way that is more universally understood. Drawing stick people is actively encouraged!
Visual
approaches to problem-solving can help foster shared understanding and
help people be more succinct or creative in their ideas. Remember: if an idea is too complex to be put into pictures, perhaps it needs further refinement.
Abstraction or abstract thinking is the art of taking things
out of their normal context and presenting them in a radical new light.
While most creative thinking skills utilise abstraction in some form,
it’s worth noting that actively trying to take an idea from one context
and place it in another is a creative approach all on its own.
Think
of Pablo Picasso’s cubist portraits – by taking something as common as a
human face and bringing abstraction to his process, he created
something radically different and innovative. You can create a similar
effect by recontextualizing ideas, concepts, and problems and by looking
at them from different, perhaps even conflicting points of view.
Abstract thinking is often built on engaging with absurdities, paradoxes, and unexpected connections.
As such, it can often be fun, wild and surprising, and is a great way
to generate creative ideas even in those who might be resistant to other
forms of creative thinking. Lean into the weird!
Telling stories or narrativizing a problem can help us not
only see things differently but understand where we share common ground
with others. Everybody tells stories – whether that’s
explaining our employment history, telling colleagues about what
happened at the weekend, or when creating user personas and journeys.
Leverage
this inclination to help people not only realize they are creative
thinkers by nature but to help them share something of themselves too!
As a creative thinking skill, storytelling is about applying our natural proclivity for stories into new situations or thinking about how to reappraise or present material narratively.
Think of the basic storytelling concept like the idea that all stories
have a beginning, middle, and end – how might we bring this thinking to a
tough challenge, a new product, or when solving a customer complaint?
You
might even use storytelling tropes like the hero’s journey when
exploring ideas or company conflicts. Whichever way you go, remember
that stories are a universal element of culture and you have a rich lineage to dip into if you need a new perspective.
How many times have you had a tough problem that you can’t seem to
solve so you get frustrated and leave your desk. Then, when you’re on a
walk, standing in the supermarket, or falling asleep, a solution seems
to arrive out of thin air? Often, you’ll find that creating space to reflect on a problem is an effective way to find a way forward.
The
trick with making reflective space work as a larger part of your
working practice is knowing when to take time to reflect, building space
into your regular schedule, and finding techniques that allow things to
surface effectively.
This might mean going for a walk with the
intention to be present in noticing the world around you and gaining
insights that can help your situation. It might also mean remembering to
take time to rest or simply read and give your brain something good to
chew on.