Mark Donnolo explains how left-brained people can learn creativity by breaking it into repeatable steps: redefine the problem, study parallel examples, and think horizontally. He treats creative thinking like learning a golf swing, something you practice and embed into how you work.
In your experience, is it easy for left brain people to adopt a more creative way of thinking?
Well, I think what it is, and I'm an old art school student from decades ago without giving away my age, but I think what it is is taking the idea of what creativity is and taking it from the ethereal or the nebulous into the practical. So when we think about creativity, a lot of people will go, well, I'm not a creative person, I'm not an innovative person, I'm a numbers person. But if you take it into the practical, and this is what I was really trying to figure out over a period of years, and what we put in the book was, how do you take this idea of creativity or innovation and turn it into something that a person can apply and can learn and you can teach? So that's where we break it apart into some different principles and some different steps that they can take to do that. So if you can learn how to sell, like most sales people learn how to sell, there are some natural salespeople, like there are natural creative people. But if you can learn how to sell or you can learn how to follow a sales process, you can learn how to be creative as well by going through some of those steps, like I mentioned around problem redefinition and looking at parallel examples and doing horizontal thinking. And you can embed that into your thinking process. So yes, it is teachable. It does take a little time and a little practice to learn how to do it though. And as I said before, you have to pause and you have to stop before you jump to an answer, because that thinking really does pay off.
So I imagine as you do it, over time it becomes more natural to you. You aren't having to force yourself to think about things a certain way.
I think of it kind of like a golf swing, right? So how many people take golf lessons over periods of years to learn how to do one thing, which is how to swing a club back and forth and strike a ball a certain distance down the fairway? So in the end, after you think about all the intricacies that go into a golf swing, about the grip, about the stance, about keeping your head down, about how your hips should move, about how you follow through when you get up and you hit that ball, in the end, you're only usually thinking about a couple of things. You might be thinking about your backswing and you might be thinking about your tempo. You can only think about a couple of things, but what you're doing is you're ingraining that swing into how you play. And it's the same thing here. We can take a process and principles that have a lot of parts to it. And the idea is you just boil it down to a couple things and it becomes a natural process for you. So it starts to change the way you think. It becomes less mechanical, and it becomes relatively easy to think through.
