Narrative thinking

What if I were to tell you a story about ...

Kids say the darnedest things. They come up with the most creative stories and ideas.

Photo by Kristin Brown on Unsplash

Well, what if I were to tell you about a theory that suggests the reason why so many adults lose their creative powers as they grow older is that they’ve been trained to forget what made them so creative back then.

Instead, they’re taught to adopt other brain habits that might be easier to explain in schools and business settings, but that aren’t as well suited to the task.

It all comes down to the difference between two distinct ways of thinking through solutions to problems: divergent thinking, and narrative thinking. Let’s explore.

Divergent thinking

On the one hand, we have divergent thinking. If you’ve ever been part of a corporate brainstorming exercise, this is what you were doing, neuroscientifically speaking, even if nobody called it that.

Divergent thinking is “ideational or visionary in nature,” according to Kathryn Haydon, author of, The Non-Obvious Guide to Being More Creative, No Matter Where You Work. “It involves rigorous gymnastics of the mind that lead to unexpected solutions.”

Random example: Imagine that we need to open a lock, but we don’t have the combination. How can we find a creative solution?

Well, we could guess the combination. Or we could figure out how to pick it. Or we could break it open with a tool. They’re decent ideas, but they’re spontaneous, non-ordered, and not really building on each other.

Narrative thinking

Compare this way of thinking to narrative thinking. This is the kind of thinking that you’ll watch children do when they’re at their creative peak.

It’s more about storytelling; each point in the creative exploration sparks a jumping off point for the next one.

So, how could we open the lock? Well, we could try to guess the combination. Maybe it’s the birthday of the lock-owner? Or else, maybe it’s another date. Maybe it’s the anniversary of his first day at work, or his wedding anniversary. What if we tried one of those?

I suppose this would be a fairly advanced child — lock-picking and anniversaries and all that — but that deficiency in the story actually makes the point more clear: Narrative thinking involves taking the way that you were instinctively creative as a child, and using it to come up with creative ideas as an adult.

Kids are more creative than adults

Authors Angus Fletcher and Mike Benveniste, who are associated with Project Narrative at The Ohio State University, explained this theory in the peer-reviewed journal, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

In short, they say that while divergent thinking is widely taught, “for decades, concerns have been raised about [its] adequacy.”

But, they point out, while children are “more imaginatively creative than adults,” there is a clue that suggests they don’t use divergent thinking, because they’re not as good at two key elements of that mode of thinking: “memory and logical association.”

It makes sense; kids just don’t have the experience and data to think through problems that way. But, they’re still highly creative, because narrative thinking works so much better.

The deficiency in divergent thinking is that it cannot “help prepare people for new challenges that we know little about,” Fletcher argued. “It can’t come up with truly original actions. But the human brain’s narrative machinery can.”

Teaching new tricks to old soldiers

It sounds great in theory. But has anyone actually tested it, or come up with a way to teach adults in positions of responsibility how to think narratively in order to become more creative?

In fact, Fletcher and Benveniste have been using exactly this approach to train senior military officers at the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College, along with executives at Fortune 50 companies.

As examples, they encourage students to use the kind of techniques that writers use in order to create stories — literally to imagine developing new worlds in their minds.

Or else, they try perspective-shifting: “An executive at a company might be asked to answer a problem by thinking like another member of their team.”

Accurate predictions aren’t really the point, Fletcher said. “It’s about making yourself open to imagining radically different possibilities.”

Train for creativity; don’t hire for it

Fletcher and Benveniste say there’s another benefit to this kind of thinking for business leaders and others who have to assemble teams.

If narrative thinking can make anyone into a more creative person, it means there’s less need to look for creativity as a trait, when recruiting and hiring.

“It’s better to hire a diverse group of people and then train them to be creative,” Fletcher said. “That creates a culture that recognizes that there are already creative people in your organization that you aren’t taking advantage of.”

I love the idea that this is how we might train our brains to be more creative.

“We are obsessed with the idea that some people are more creative than others,” Fletcher said. “But the reality is that we’re just not training creativity in the right way.”

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7 other things worth knowing today

• President Trump pardoned a convicted tax cheat who withheld more than $10 million from employees paychecks but used it for things like a $2 million yacht and "purchases at high-end retailers," weeks after his mother attended a $1 million-per-person Trump fundraiser at Mar-a-Largo. Paul Walczak, 55, had been sentenced to 18 months in federal prison and a $4 million fine; the pardon came the day before his sentence was to begin. (The New York Times)

• Russian forces have taken four border villages in Ukraine’s northeastern Sumy region, days after Russian President Vladimir Putin said he had ordered troops to establish a buffer zone along the border. Moscow’s invasion has shown no signs of stopping despite months of intense U.S.-led efforts to secure a ceasefire and get traction for peace talks. (AP)

• As Ukrainian POWs die in Russian prisons, autopsies point to a system of brutality. (AP)

• A Bronx high schooler showed up for a routine immigration court date. ICE was waiting. In courthouses across the country, government lawyers are asking judges to dismiss cases against migrants, then immediately reopened them as “expedited removal” cases — allowing authorities to apprehend their targets on the spot and thrust them into a sped-up deportation process with fewer legal checks. (Chalkbeat)

• Morale is plummeting inside the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs as tens of thousands of employees prepare for deep staffing cuts, raising alarms among staffers, veterans and advocates. “The people you spoke with are probably being misled by The Washington Post’s dishonest, far-left fearmongering,” a VA spokesman said when asked for comment. (The Washington Post)

• Heart attack or panic attack? Why young men are calling ambulances for unmanaged anxiety. (The Conversation)

• A marathon runner was bothered by blizzard of disposable cups at races. She invented something better. (AP)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Sam Balye on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.