5.1.5 Psychological Barriers (continued)

D) Evaluating Too Quickly

This barrier ‑ evaluating too quickly ‑ is not an easy one to remove. Everybody has a well developed capability of evaluating ideas, and this is applied almost instinctively when ideas are put forward. As with the ‘automatic no' response, we tend to analyse and too often reject ideas which are slightly offbeat or new: 'that's silly', 'that won't work' or 'we tried it last year and it didn't work are common phrases. The idea is then buried and a chance has been lost to develop new approaches.

One way of understanding this barrier is to look at your hands. If the left hand represents idea production and the right hand represents idea evaluation, the two hands are not separate as in real life but are linked and linked very tightly indeed. So much so, that an idea produced is immediately evaluated and possibly killed, e.g. by the phrase, 'that won't work'.

Success in creative thinking demands that the two linked hands should be separated, and that the right hand (idea evaluation) should be put on one side, for the moment. All ideas are acceptable in a creative situation, regardless of their quality. They may be good, bad, useful, useless, and illegal ‑ it doesn't matter, for in a creative session all ideas are acceptable. Subsequently, the evaluation hand is brought back and at that stage a strange thing happens. Some of the ideas, which would have originally been dismissed out of hand, are looked at afresh, possibly with the comment: 'Wait a minute, there may be something in that idea after all'. The ideas are given a chance to develop and not rejected too quickly. While the original idea may be silly or useless, it may lead onto other ideas which are readily applicable. So evaluation has no part to play in a creative situation, and all ideas, however wild or silly are accepted. Later, at the end of the session one or two really wild ideas are examined afresh.

Linked to this barrier, is the phrase, 'suspend judgment'. In the creative situation no evaluation or judgement is allowed, either of other people's ideas or your own. Judgment is suspended until later and all ideas are accepted.