Rachel: A NASA study gave a creativity test to 1,600 five-year-olds. 98% of them scored at the 'genius' level for creative imagination. Justine: Ninety-eight percent! That's basically everyone. So we all start out as little Picassos and Einsteins. Rachel: Exactly. But here's the shocking part. They re-tested those same kids at age ten, and the number of 'creative geniuses' dropped to just 30%. Justine: Oh, that's a steep drop. What happened? School? Rachel: It gets worse. They tested them again at fifteen, and it was down to 12%. And when they tested over 250,000 adults? Only 2%. Justine: Two percent! That's not a drop, that's a cliff. What on earth is happening to us between kindergarten and our first job? It’s like we’re systematically unlearning our most valuable human skill. Rachel: That is the exact question at the heart of the book we’re diving into today: The Creative Thinking Handbook: Your step-by-step guide to problem solving in business by Chris Griffiths, with Melina Costi and Caragh Medlicott. Justine: I like that title. It sounds practical, not like some airy-fairy treatise on finding your muse. Rachel: And that's the author, Chris Griffiths, in a nutshell. This isn't just a theorist. He's a massively successful entrepreneur and what you might call an innovation coach to the stars. He’s worked with Fortune 500 companies, the United Nations, and has even facilitated brainstorming sessions for Nobel Laureates. Justine: Okay, so he’s seen creativity—or the lack of it—in some very high-stakes rooms. So, if we're all born creative geniuses, what does he say is the culprit? Where does it all go wrong? Rachel: He argues it’s not one single thing. It’s a series of invisible traps our own brains set for us. The book calls them 'thinking errors,' and they are the silent killers of good ideas.

Justine: Thinking errors? That sounds… personal. Like my brain is actively working against me. Rachel: In a way, it is! But for a good reason: efficiency. Our brains create mental shortcuts to get through the day. The book identifies three major types of these errors. The first is Selective Thinking. This is our tendency to see what we expect to see and to filter out anything that contradicts our existing beliefs. Justine: Oh, I know this one. It's confirmation bias. It’s why my uncle only reads news that proves his political points. Rachel: Precisely. And in business, it’s deadly. The book gives the classic example of Henry Ford with the Model T. By the 1920s, customers were begging for variety, for different colors. But Ford was so attached to his hyper-efficient, one-model system that he famously said, "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black." Justine: He was selectively ignoring the data right in front of him because it didn't fit his successful formula. Rachel: Exactly. He was stuck. And while he was stuck, General Motors came in and offered a car for "every purse and purpose," and completely ate Ford's lunch. A more modern example? Blockbuster. They saw Netflix coming, but they were a company built on brick-and-mortar stores and late fees. The idea of mail-order DVDs, let alone streaming, was so alien to their 'pet idea' of what a video rental business was, they selectively dismissed it as a niche fad. Justine: Until the niche fad bankrupted them. Okay, so our brains are stubborn and filter reality. What's the next error? Rachel: The second one is Reactive Thinking. This is our brain's love for the quick, intuitive, gut-reaction answer. It's our System 1 thinking, as Daniel Kahneman would call it. The book has a fantastic little puzzle to show this in action. Are you ready? Justine: Lay it on me. Rachel: A bat and a ball cost one pound and ten pence in total. The bat costs one pound more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Justine: Okay... ten pence. Rachel: That's what almost everyone says. And it's wrong. Justine: What? How? If the bat is a pound more... oh, wait. If the ball is 10p, and the bat is £1 more, the bat is £1.10. That adds up to £1.20. Drat. Rachel: The correct answer is that the ball costs five pence. The bat costs £1.05, which is exactly one pound more, and together they cost £1.10. Your brain jumped to the easy, reactive answer—10p—instead of doing the slow, deliberate work of calculation. Justine: My brain took a shortcut and drove right off a cliff. That's genuinely unsettling. So we're stubborn, and we're lazy. What's the third thinking error? Rachel: The third is Assumptive Thinking. This is when we accept things as true without any proof, just because "that's the way it's always been done." These are the invisible rules that govern our lives and our industries. Justine: Like the assumption that you need a physical keyboard on a phone? BlackBerry held onto that one for dear life. Rachel: A perfect example. Or think about the airline industry before Richard Branson. The assumption was that flying economy had to be a miserable, no-frills experience. You get a cramped seat and maybe a tiny bag of peanuts if you're lucky. First class gets the luxury. Justine: Right, that was just the rule. Rachel: But Branson challenged that. When he launched Virgin Atlantic, he asked, "Why?" He got rid of first class entirely, made his business class what first class used to be, and started adding amazing perks to economy—free drinks, seat-back videos, things that were unheard of. He broke the assumption that cheap had to mean bad, and it completely disrupted the industry. Justine: Okay, I'm convinced. My brain is a stubborn, lazy, assumption-riddled machine that is actively trying to make me less creative. This is a bit depressing, Rachel. Is there any hope for us? What's the fix?

Rachel: There is absolutely hope! That's the entire second half of the book. Griffiths argues that because these are learned patterns, they can be unlearned. And he provides a beautifully structured system to do it, which he calls The Solution Finder. Justine: The Solution Finder. I like the sound of that. It sounds like a superhero's gadget. Rachel: It kind of is! It's a four-step process, a repeatable recipe for applied creativity. The steps are: Understand, Ideate, Analyze, and Direct. But the book argues that the most important step, the one everyone messes up, is the very first one: Understand. Justine: What do you mean? Don't we usually understand the problem we're trying to solve? Rachel: We think we do. But often, we're just solving the surface-level symptom, not the root cause. The book tells an absolutely brilliant story about this. In the late 90s, Procter & Gamble wanted to revolutionize floor cleaning. So they tasked their scientists with a clear mission: "Create a better cleaning liquid for mops." Justine: Seems straightforward enough. A stronger, faster-acting soap. Rachel: That's what they thought. But for years, they got nowhere. Any soap strong enough to clean tough grime also stripped the varnish off wood floors or was harsh on people's skin. They were stuck. So they outsourced the problem to a design firm. And the first thing the design firm did was not go to the lab. They went into people's homes and just... watched them clean. Justine: Spying on people mopping their floors. That's a weird job. Rachel: They put up video cameras, took detailed notes, and what they saw was that mopping was a huge, tedious ordeal. People hated hauling out a bucket and a heavy mop for a small spill. Then came the breakthrough moment. One day, they were observing a subject who spilled some coffee grounds on the floor. And instead of getting the mop, she just grabbed a damp paper towel, wiped it up, and threw it away. Justine: Ah. The lightbulb moment. Rachel: Exactly. The design firm realized P&G was trying to solve the wrong problem. The problem wasn't "we need a better soap for our mops." The real, underlying problem was "mopping is a terrible experience for quick clean-ups." People wanted something fast and disposable. Justine: So it's like going to the doctor complaining of a headache, and they keep giving you stronger and stronger painkillers. But the real problem is you just need glasses. You have to diagnose the right problem first. Rachel: That's the perfect analogy. And out of that correct diagnosis came the Swiffer. A disposable paper towel on the end of a stick. It became one of P&G's most successful products ever, all because they stopped and truly understood the challenge. The book provides tools for this, like the '5W1H Canvas'—forcing you to ask Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How about your problem until you get to the real root of it. Justine: I love that. It takes creativity out of the realm of some magical lightning strike and turns it into a deliberate, almost forensic, process. It's not about waiting for an apple to fall on your head; it's about carefully examining the tree, the branch, and the apple first. Rachel: That's the core idea. A structured process doesn't stifle creativity; it enables it. It gives it a track to run on. Justine: This system sounds fantastic for an individual or a small, dedicated team. But my mind immediately goes to the corporate world. How do you get a whole organization, with its bureaucracy and its fear of failure, to think this way? It feels like the company culture could just crush this beautiful little process.

Rachel: You've hit on the final, and perhaps most crucial, part of the book. It argues that a system is not enough. You need the right environment. And that comes from Creative Leadership. But here’s the twist: the book says a creative leader's job isn't to be the most creative person in the room. Justine: Hold on. That's counter-intuitive. You'd think the head of innovation should be the one with all the brilliant ideas. Rachel: The book quotes the author Ken Robinson, who said, "The role of a creative leader is not to have all the ideas; it’s to create a culture where everyone can have ideas and feel that they’re valued." The leader's job is to build the greenhouse where ideas can grow. Justine: So the leader is more of a gardener than a star player. What does that look like in practice? Rachel: The book gives a great personal example from John Cleese of Monty Python. He found that to write his most creative sketches, he couldn't do it in a busy office or with constant interruptions. He had to create what he called an 'oasis' for himself—a specific time and space, about 90 minutes, where he was completely sealed off from the outside world, just to think and play with ideas. Justine: He built his own little greenhouse. Rachel: Exactly. And a creative leader's job is to build that oasis for their entire team. The book points to companies like Google with their famously playful offices—the slides, the free food, the game rooms. It's easy to dismiss that as a silly, expensive perk. But the book argues it's a deliberate strategy. Research shows that a positive, playful mood makes our thinking more flexible and open. They're engineering a state of mind. Justine: Okay, but slides and free food can feel a bit superficial. A company can have a slide in the lobby and still have a toxic culture of fear. Does the book get deeper than that? Rachel: It does. It says the most important part of the 'oasis' is psychological safety. It's about what happens when an idea fails. The book tells the story of Pixar. We see them now as this unstoppable hit-making machine, but it took them 16 years of experiments and, in their words, "mess-ups" before they released their first full-length movie, Toy Story. Their early ventures in selling hardware were a total failure. Justine: I had no idea. I just assumed they started with Toy Story and never looked back. Rachel: Their culture was built on the idea that failure isn't just acceptable; it's necessary. It's where the learning happens. Another great example is the discovery of Viagra. Pfizer was testing a drug for heart conditions, and it was a total flop. It didn't work. But during the trials, they noticed a very... unexpected side effect. Justine: I think I know where this is going. Rachel: A company with a fear-based culture would have just written the whole project off as a failure. But their leaders were creative enough to see the opportunity in the failure. They completely pivoted their strategy and turned a failed heart drug into one ofthe most successful pharmaceuticals of all time. That's creative leadership—pulling insight from failure.

Rachel: When you pull it all together, the book lays out this beautiful, holistic journey. It starts with the individual, forcing us to confront the fact that our own brains are rigged with thinking errors. Justine: The stubborn, lazy, assumption-filled brain. Got it. Rachel: Then, it gives us a practical, systematic tool—the Solution Finder—to debug that mental software and overcome those errors. It's the 'how-to' guide for thinking better. Justine: It’s the recipe for getting from a problem to a real, well-diagnosed solution, like the Swiffer. Rachel: And finally, it zooms out to the organizational level. It argues that even the best system will fail without a culture to protect it. Creative leadership isn't about having genius ideas; it's about building that 'oasis'—that greenhouse of psychological safety, playfulness, and purpose—where everyone else's ideas can thrive. Justine: So it’s a complete ecosystem. You have to fix yourself, use a good process, and exist in a healthy environment. The deep insight here is that creativity isn't a singular event, like a lightning strike. It's a continuous, interconnected system. Rachel: That's it perfectly. It's not an act; it's an atmosphere. And the good news is, it's an atmosphere we can all help build. The book suggests one incredibly simple action to start. When you're faced with a problem, just take 15 minutes to consciously reflect on it before you even think about jumping to a solution. Just pause and use those '5W1H' questions. Justine: Just 15 minutes to stop being reactive and start being thoughtful. That feels doable. It makes me think about my own work. What's one assumption I hold about how we produce this podcast that might be holding us back? Rachel: That's a great question for all of us to ask. Justine: A powerful and practical guide. I feel like my brain just got a much-needed software update. Rachel: This is Aibrary, signing off.