Five Levels of Creative Thinking

Creativity gets talked about everywhere these days. Pick up any newspaper and you'll find articles about how important creative thinking is for business success. Yet when it comes to actual methods, the advice ranges from incredibly abstract concepts to rigid techniques developed decades ago. There's supposedly a right way and wrong way to approach creativity, but the truth is more nuanced.

Understanding creativity becomes clearer when we think about it in terms of cognitive depth. How much mental effort and awareness does each approach require? This framework reveals five distinct levels, each building upon the previous one, each accessing different parts of our thinking process.

Level One: The Art of Imitation

The most accessible form of creativity involves what psychologists call mimetic techniques. The term comes from ancient Greek, referring to the concept of imitation that philosophers explored centuries ago. At its core, this approach means observing what works elsewhere and adapting it to your situation.

Imagine taking a camera and spending a day documenting how a completely different industry solves problems. Like an anthropologist studying a foreign culture, you'd likely discover dozens of approaches that could transform your own work. The key is writing down these observations and asking yourself how they might look in your context.

This connects to a fundamental cognitive principle called flexibility. Our minds can transfer solutions from one domain to another when we train ourselves to look beyond surface differences. Some of the most famous innovators in history have talked about creativity as simply connecting dots, moving useful ideas from one area where they work well to another area where they haven't been tried yet.

Level Two: Connecting the Unconnected

The second level involves what researchers call bissociative thinking, a term coined by a famous author who wrote extensively about the creative process. This approach focuses on connecting things that normally don't go together, creating new possibilities through unexpected combinations.

Brainstorming represents the most common application of this level, though it takes many forms beyond simply throwing out random ideas. More structured approaches include the slip method, where people write ideas on paper and pass them around the room, allowing concepts to build and evolve as they circulate.

One particularly useful technique involves random word association. Open a dictionary, point to any word, and ask how your current challenge relates to that completely unrelated concept. This works because of something called defamiliarization. Our brains store similar information together, like items grouped on a children's educational show. When you force connections between dissimilar concepts, you create new neural pathways and discover possibilities that logical thinking alone might miss.

For example, if you're developing a new television program about innovation and randomly connect it to the word "popsicle," you might explore ideas about coolness, having something to hold onto, creating a treat, or making something refreshing. These unexpected associations often spark breakthrough insights.

More systematic approaches exist as well. One popular method uses the acronym that stands for substitute, combine, adapt, magnify or minimize, put to other uses, eliminate, and reverse. This framework provides specific prompts for transforming existing ideas into something new.

Level Three: The Power of Analogy

Analogical thinking represents a deeper level of creative engagement. This involves making deliberate comparisons between your challenge and something completely different, then exploring what those similarities might teach you.

Cognitive psychologists have long recognized that analogies help our minds transfer knowledge by bundling concepts together. When you ask how developing a new soft drink is like a racing competition, your brain starts making unexpected connections. There's limited time, multiple competitors, the need for audience engagement to make it worthwhile.

The real insight comes when you flip the metaphor around and examine what elements you might be missing. Who's the pit crew in your soft drink development? Who are the drivers? What role does the track play? By identifying these gaps, you often discover crucial components you hadn't considered.

The key is choosing analogies that everyone can relate to. Cultural familiarity matters. A first kiss, the transition from spring to summer, morning routines, or common experiences work better than specialized references that exclude team members.

Level Four: The Story Integration

Narratological thinking, the fourth level, requires creating complete stories around your ideas. This is significantly more challenging because stories demand integration of multiple elements: characters, plot, theme, setting, and emotional arc. Children often struggle with storytelling and sometimes create fictional accounts not from mischief but because integrating all these elements coherently is genuinely difficult.

Yet once a story takes hold in our minds, it becomes remarkably persistent. This is why changing our approach to persistent challenges often requires changing the story we tell ourselves about those challenges. Therapists frequently work with clients to rewrite their personal narratives around weight loss, relationships, career failures, or other life transitions.

To harness this for innovation, try telling the story of your product or idea repeatedly, but change one element each time. Remove a key feature, change the target market, alter the timeline, eliminate a constraint. As you retell the story multiple times, you develop what performers call your "shtick." You discover what really matters at the core of your concept.

This process mirrors the iterative nature of writing itself. No one creates a perfect first draft. You write multiple versions because you're discovering what you're actually trying to say through the act of saying it.

Some people find that writing with their non-dominant hand accesses different cognitive resources, though this remains scientifically controversial. More structured approaches involve creating story morphologies, breaking narratives into component parts and rebuilding them like modular blocks.

Think of it as a grid where one axis lists all the characters in your story (creators, buyers, sellers, regulators) and the other axis shows possible actions (stopping, enabling, funding, criticizing). By systematically exploring what happens when different characters take different actions, you can reconstruct your story in entirely new ways.

Level Five: Beyond Conscious Control

The deepest level involves intuitive creativity, where you attempt to transcend analytical thinking altogether. This includes practices like meditation, where you work to quiet mental chatter and access whatever insights might emerge from deeper awareness.

Physical activities can serve similar functions. Running, yoga, or other repetitive activities often create states where conscious problem solving gives way to unexpected insights. There's typically a moment during these activities where you stop focusing on the activity itself and enter a different kind of mental space where new ideas can surface.

This level requires particular caution because you never know what might emerge when you quiet your analytical mind. Having guidance from experienced practitioners or professionals becomes important, whether from established wisdom traditions or qualified therapeutic support.

Building Your Creative Practice

These five levels work best when approached sequentially. Start with mimetic approaches by observing how other industries solve similar problems. Practice bissociative techniques through various forms of brainstorming and random association. Develop your analogical thinking by regularly comparing your challenges to familiar experiences. Build narrative skills by telling and retelling the stories around your ideas.

Only after developing competence at these more accessible levels does it make sense to explore the deeper, more intuitive approaches to creative thinking. Each level builds cognitive muscles that support the next, creating a comprehensive toolkit for breakthrough thinking that can adapt to whatever challenges you face.