Foreword

People have used their imaginations since the dawn of humanity to creatively resolve problems, to innovate, and to advance society. Unfortunately, for most of human history we have taken our creative thinking for granted, generally assuming that only a small number of gifted people were endowed with the ability to imagine and manifest new possibilities. Our own experiences, and now the scientific study of creativity, underscore the fact that we all engage in creative thinking – it's just something that all humans do. To varying degrees we all imagine and create our world. From your aunt who has always been clever with crafts to Nobel scientists who are recognized for their breakthrough thinking, we have all been endowed with minds that create. The question is, to what degree do you take advantage of this natural gift?

Although humans have always been creative, it was not until the middle of the twentieth century that psychologists began to closely examine, and scientifically study, this quality that fundamentally separates us from all other species on our planet. With more than six decades of research and thinking, numerous books and scholarly journals are now filled with information about the nature of creativity. Among many insights, one undeniable fact has emerged – creative thinking is a teachable and trainable skill.

It was my early work as a creativity trainer that led to the theory upon which this book is based. In the late 1980s I was working as part of a consulting team responsible for delivering creativity training to managers employed by Procter & Gamble. Our job was to train course participants in Creative Problem Solving, a well-established process and set of thinking tools, which could be used by these managers to more skillfully and deliberately apply their imaginations to business challenges and opportunities. It was over a coffee break during one of these corporate training programs that the seed of an idea was planted, an idea that over time grew, and is revealed in this book in the form of a fable.

Our training program was built upon a process proven to promote breakthrough thinking for problems that do not have easy answers. In broad terms, we taught participants how to look at challenges and opportunities from new perspectives, how to use their imaginations to generate original ideas, ways to evaluate and strengthen the most promising solutions, and how to navigate resistance to new propositions so that their breakthroughs might be more readily adopted. The training program featured principles, tools, and strategies that reinforced success in each of these areas of the creative process. After facilitating participants through a creative decision-making tool used to systematically evaluate and refine the most promising solutions, two managers engaged me in a conversation over coffee. The first manager, let's use the name Pat, quickly approached me to relay how difficult it was for her to learn this tool. Pat felt a good deal of frustration in having to be so deliberate, specific, and objective in rating each one of her options against a formal set of criteria. It wasn't just what Pat said but how she said it that had an impact on me. Her tone and body language clearly highlighted that the use of this tool was a real struggle for her.

Feeling bad about subjecting someone to an apparently painful learning experience, I continued with my coffee break. Only a few more minutes into this break, another manager approached me. Let's call him Fred. Fred put his hand on my shoulder and with a smile on his face expressed deep gratitude for teaching him the same decision-making tool that Pat had found so difficult. Fred explained that the tool fit perfectly with his natural approach to making choices and that he now had a structured method for being even more deliberate and systematic in evaluating and developing competing options. It was a good thing for me that the conversation with Fred closely followed my chat with Pat, as it lifted my spirits before reengaging the group in the training course.

These opposing reactions served as a catalyst for what grew into a theory and measure called FourSight. The coffee break conversations made me realize that people had their own naturally built-in way of engaging in creative thinking. That is to say, I realized that while creative thinking is natural to all humans, not all humans engage in creative thinking in the same way. Psychologists refer to this as cognitive style, which means that people will differ in terms of how they prefer to organize and process information. The FourSight theory and measure helps people to identify their preferences within the creative process. In hindsight, it is now clear to me that Pat and Fred simply had different creative-thinking preferences.

Working with colleagues, most notably Blair Miller and Sarah Thurber, over the last twenty years or so, we have discovered that most people report having higher levels of energy for some areas of the creative process over others. We refer to these four creative-thinking preference types as Clarifiers, Ideators, Developers, and Implementers. Each way of thinking is fundamental to the creative process; that is, you need all four to generate breakthroughs, but our research and applied work has highlighted the fact that people will vary in regard to how comfortable they are thinking and behaving as Clarifiers, Ideators, Developers, and Implementers. Granted, there are those individuals who show an equal level of energy across all four preferences; we refer to these folks as Integrators as they are equally comfortable drawing on any one of these four breakthrough-thinking preferences. Looking back at the coffee-break conversations, my hypothesis now is that Pat was probably an Ideator and therefore was challenged by the decision-making tool, while Fred was most likely a Developer who has a good deal of energy for evaluative thinking.

Over this time period we have conducted more than a dozen research studies that have helped us to understand further the personalities, skills, attitudes, and preferences of Clarifiers, Ideators, Developers, Implementers, and Integrators. At the same time we have had tens of thousands of individuals from around the world use the FourSight measure as part of their professional development. This applied work has reinforced and extended two key areas of value associated with FourSight: benefits for individuals and teams.

First, the value of knowing FourSight preferences at an individual level include:

• recognizing your strengths and natural areas of comfort as you engage in the thinking required to come up with breakthroughs
• understanding your blind spots, and potential areas of pitfalls, as you move through the creative process
• learning what areas of thinking you need to develop to become a more creative powerhouse

Second, with respect to teams and working with others in general, the benefits of knowing your own and others’ FourSight preferences include:

• transitioning from the use of judgmental or negative labels, especially when someone has a different way of thinking from you, to an appreciation of differences, thus creating a more positive climate for creative thinking
• reducing tension or conflict on a team that has diverse FourSight preferences by helping members recognize how these differences may lead to frustration, sometimes hidden and sometimes overt, when working together to solve problems or produce breakthrough ideas
• improving overall performance by revealing biases a team might possess with respect to the creative process which allows the team to be certain that they are adequately addressing all areas of the creative process

This book is focused primarily on the benefits of FourSight for a team. It reveals how awareness of FourSight preferences, one's own and others', can help a team improve performance by appreciating and leveraging diverse thinking preferences. Additionally, it shows how the formal application of the steps of the creative process represented by the four FourSight preferences, i.e., clarifying the problem, generating ideas, developing solutions, and implementing action, enables a team to produce innovative breakthroughs.

This book was written to help teams take advantage of the creative talents of their team members to help teams sustain their innovation efforts by recognizing that innovation does not have to be left up to chance. Instead, a formal process can be used to produce breakthrough thinking, and to recognize that within this process people will have different preferences.

The ideas contained in this book are based on years of research and application. FourSight has been around for twenty years and the Creative Problem Solving process has been used in a variety of settings and studied by various researchers for over fifty years. Given this body of work, I am confident that the content of this book will prove beneficial to you and your team's innovation efforts.

Gerard J. Puccio, PhD
Buffalo, NY