You've probably have heard about the curse of knowledge, which states that once you know something, it's difficult to imagine what it is like to not know it. The same applies to creative thinking. Once you get it, once it starts to makes perfect sense, it's very hard to imagine why it's so hard for someone else not to be in that same place.

I was trying to imagine what it was like not to be so actively involved in applied creative thinking. I was trying to get a bearing on how that once felt like. This weekend, I got a very good taste of it.

I was spending the weekend with a number of colleagues, sharing experiences, techniques, models and exercises when my colleague in creativity, Willem Stortelder, invited us to do the following. You look for a fairly open space, you stand up, close your eyes and concentrate on the question at hand. Once you have a clear sense of whet you are trying to solve, you start walking…with your eyes closed.
Everyone has got a partner assigned to and he/she guides you by tapping on the shoulder you need to turn to. A gentle tap on the left shoulder, means you have to go to the left a little. A firm hand on your right shoulder, means you need to make a sharp right turn. You do this for 5 minutes and reflect on the answers that come to you while walking. The idea is to build on trust. You trust your partner and you trust that the answer will come to you.

During our walk, something quite unanticipated happened. It was a beautiful day and the weather was just glorious. And so there we were, in the warmth of the sun, with our eyes closed and we started walking. Since we were in the courtyard of a 18th century farm, our guides needed to keep us clear from the building structures. But by walking around, all of us, at one point or another, stepped out of the sun and into the shadow of one of the buildings.
The moment that happened, all of us were startled by it. It wasn't the idea that there was a nearby wall of obstacle, but by the unusual way our senses interpreted the shadow.

Because we couldn't see the sunlight or shadow, you automatically start depending on your other senses. Your feet don't just carry your weight, they try to sense the surface, very carefully. Your ears no longer hear sounds, they really pay attention and try to interpret what the sounds are telling them about where you are and what is going on around you. Your skin, no longer just feels the difference in temperature between sun and shade, it warns you about the temperature shift in its own distinct way. And that shift in sensing the reality around you, makes you respond to it in a completely different way.

Without my dominant sense telling me where I was – which in my case would be vision and my guess is that there's a good chance so is yours – I had to reinterpret the same information in a completely different and quite alienating way.

And suddenly I knew it. This is exactly how I felt when I first got to reinterpret ideas in a deliberate, creative way. My senses just didn't know what to make of it. Or better said, they did, very much so…it was me who didn't know what to make of what my less dominant senses were so clearly telling me.

Willem's exercise shows you how to trust that process all over again. It invites you to live life with all your senses. It reconnected me with that wondrous first time AHA experience. Which is just…wow, even if you do run into a wall every now and then.

Take care,
Karl

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