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Category: Thinking
Type: Cognitive Framework
Origin: Wallas, The Art of Thought, 1926; Guilford, 1950; OECD PISA, 2022
Also known as: Creative cognition, little-c creativity, generative thinking
Quick Answer — Creative Thinking is the skill of generating, evaluating, and improving ideas so they are both original and useful. The research has a clear line: Wallas mapped the process in 1926, Guilford made creativity a research problem in 1950, and the OECD later treated it as a competence that can be taught. Read along that line, and a wild idea is not yet creative work. The idea still has to survive evaluation and prove useful.

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What is Creative Thinking?

Creative Thinking is the competence to produce ideas that are new and fit for purpose, then to test and improve them until they do a job.
The competence to engage productively in the generation, evaluation and improvement of ideas that can result in original and effective solutions, advances in knowledge and impactful expressions of imagination.
That is how the OECD defined Creative Thinking for PISA 2022. It is narrower than “creativity” as a life story or a genius brand, and it names three moves you can practice: generate, evaluate, improve. Runco and Jaeger’s 2012 standard definition of creativity adds the two tests those moves must pass: originality and effectiveness. What is new but useless is noise; what is useful but not new is still routine. The everyday picture is leftover rice. Following last week’s recipe is only competent, and stirring ketchup into coffee is only original. Frying the rice with what is actually in the fridge, tasting, and adjusting the salt is Creative Thinking. Divergent thinking supplies the first burst of options, and convergent thinking makes the later cut. Creative Thinking has to do both, then go back and raise the idea that survived. Analytical thinking takes a tangle apart and names the joints. Creative Thinking reassembles those pieces—or pieces from another room—into a pattern that did not exist yet. Lateral thinking is one method for leaving the old path. The skill also includes the evaluation and improvement that come after the jump.

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Creative Thinking in 3 Depths

  • Beginner: Do not stop at the first idea, and do not keep every idea. The everyday cue is a meal from leftovers, a gift under a budget, or a sentence that is clever but does not answer the question.
  • Practitioner: Split the hour. Generate without scoring, then score for novelty and fit, then change one thing and test again. A three-column list—ideas, what is new, what job they do—beats a longer brainstorm dump.
  • Advanced: Creative Thinking is not a personality type. Amabile’s model needs domain skill, idea-generation processes, and motivation at the same time. The OECD treats the skill as malleable, which means it can be changed. The usual failure is admiring a surprise and skipping the check that the surprise works.

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Origin

Creative Thinking began as a description of how new thoughts arrive. It did not begin as a workplace slogan. In 1926, Graham Wallas published The Art of Thought. He split a new idea into four stages he could name: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. Illumination is the moment the idea suddenly appears. Helmholtz and Poincaré had already described sudden insight after hard work that, for a time, leads nowhere. Wallas added the last stage on purpose, because a happy idea still has to be checked and put into exact form. Classroom and lab language arrived later. In 1950, J. P. Guilford, in his APA presidential address, said that psychologists had neglected creativity. The address was published in American Psychologist. He argued that IQ tests measured the ability to find one right answer and missed the ability to produce many possibilities. His later Structure of Intellect work made divergent production—producing many possibilities—a factor that can be measured. That factor is the ancestor of divergent thinking. It does not mean evaluation can be skipped. In 2001, Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl recast Bloom’s taxonomy. Create—generate, plan, produce—sat at the top of the cognitive-process list, meaning put elements together into a new whole. In 2022, the OECD’s PISA assessment treated Creative Thinking as a competence 15-year-olds can show in everyday tasks, not only in art class. Results published in 2024 put the OECD mean near 33 points; about one in two OECD students reached Level 4, with original and diverse ideas on simple everyday problems. The name now travels as a job skill. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2023 ranked Creative Thinking second among core skills, just behind analytical thinking. The 2025 report still lists it among the top core skills—fourth in that survey—and among the skills expected to keep rising through 2030. The rank is about demand. The definition is still generate, evaluate, and improve, under the two tests of new and useful.

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Key Points

Creative Thinking earns its keep when the old answer no longer works and a new one must still work. It fails when a surprise is treated as a finished product.
1

Demand novelty and usefulness together

Ask two questions of every candidate: what is new here, and what job does it do? A slogan that only startles fails the second test; a tweak that only copies last year’s plan fails the first. Runco and Jaeger’s pair is that filter. If you cannot name both, you do not yet have Creative Thinking. What you have is a mood.
2

Separate generation from evaluation, then rejoin them

Guilford was right that the first pass should produce many, and the OECD was right that the skill also includes evaluation and improvement. Keep both. Brainstorming is one way to delay the critic. It is not a reason to spend the whole afternoon generating. After the list, score, combine, and change one variable. Divergent thinking that never comes back is a pile of ideas, not a usable result.
3

Load the domain before you hunt for leaps

Teresa Amabile’s 1983 componential model treats domain-relevant skill as fuel, not as the enemy of imagination. A person who does not know adhesives will not invent a reusable note. Analogical thinking still needs something real on both sides of the analogy. Preparation is Wallas’s first stage, and it is not an extra step. That is why it comes first. Novelty with nothing behind it is easy to come by.
4

Treat the environment as part of the method

Silver could keep presenting a “failed” glue because 3M ran internal seminars, and Fry could borrow it because the idea was still in the same building. Motivation drops when every new move is punished. Constraints such as a budget, materials, or a real user can help, so long as they do not freeze the first draft as the only draft.

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Applications

Use Creative Thinking when you need a new option that still has to meet a real constraint. It is not a reason to skip the brief.

Turn an open assignment into generate-then-fit

If the prompt says create or propose, do not hand in the first clever angle. List five framings, mark which are new, and keep the one that still answers the question. Early-career work gets cleaner when originality is visible and the rubric is met.

Replace 'any idea' meetings with a two-pass workshop

Spend twenty minutes on quantity. Then score for novelty and for a job the customer, patient, or budget actually has. Change the winner once and test it. A wall of stickies with no second pass is a performance, not Creative Thinking.

Cook the week from what is already in the house

Name the constraint first: time, leftover rice, a child who will not eat spice. Generate two or three plates, taste, and adjust. Household arrangements work the same way. A new Saturday plan still has to fit sleep, money, and who can drive.

Offer policy options, not a single slogan

“We should innovate” is too vague to act on. Generate two or three mechanisms, say who they help, and name one way they could fail. Voters and boards then have something they can improve. A novel slogan with no mechanism is not yet a public idea.

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Case Study

The public case you can check, point by point, is 3M’s Post-it Notes. It is not a claim that one choir bookmark is the whole of innovation. In 1968, 3M chemist Spencer Silver was trying to improve acrylate adhesives. He produced a low-tack glue of tiny acrylic spheres: strong enough to hold paper, weak enough to let the sheets part without tearing. Judged as an answer to “make a stronger tape,” it was a poor one. Silver kept presenting it. 3M’s own history has him nicknamed Mr. Persistent. In 1974, colleague Art Fry, singing in a church choir, was tired of scrap-paper bookmarks falling out of the hymnal. He remembered Silver’s adhesive, and the first use was a bookmark. Internal circulation then shifted the product: people wrote on the notes, stuck questions on reports, and stuck answers back. Novelty had met a specific job. A 1977 test in four cities under the name Press ’n Peel drew a lukewarm response. People did not buy what they had not handled. A later sampling campaign in Boise, Idaho—the Boise Blitz—put pads in users’ hands. Ninety percent of those who tried the notes said they would buy them, according to 3M’s product history. In 1980, the notes launched across the United States as Post-it Notes. The boundary to keep in view is this: the story is little-c product work inside a firm that already knew adhesives and allowed a “failed” material to stay visible. Little-c is the alias for creativity that is not a genius brand. The sudden insight did not become a product that could ship. Evaluation, sampling, and a change of use—from bookmark to note—were the improvement step. Creative Thinking here is the whole sequence, not Silver’s repeated presentation.

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Boundaries and Failure Modes

Creative Thinking fails when domain knowledge is missing. You can generate original medical advice and still harm someone. Amabile’s first component is not optional. In safety-critical work, verification has to be heavier than the illumination that preceded it. It also fails when the environment punishes every unfinished idea, or when “be creative” is used to erase a real constraint. A budget, a law, or a patient’s limit is often the frame that makes a new fit possible. Design thinking is a reminder that the test is the user, not how clever the idea sounds. The common misuse is to treat idea generation as delay. You keep adding to the list so you never have to choose. Wallas’s verification is the brake. Another misuse is to treat any artsy tone as Creative Thinking, or to treat divergent thinking as the whole skill. Quantity is only one phase. What follows is whether the idea fits.

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Common Misconceptions

The English name is easily mixed up with art class, with brainstorming, and with talent myths.
Painting can be one arena. So can a routing change, a leftover meal, or a clearer form for a public office. The OECD built PISA tasks in written and visual expression and in social and scientific problem-solving. The skill is new-and-useful ideas. It is not tied to one medium.
Generating as many ideas as possible is only the divergent pass. Guilford measured it because earlier tests had ignored it. The OECD’s definition still includes evaluation and improvement. A long list that never meets a job is not Creative Thinking. Convergent thinking is part of the same competence. It narrows the options until they can be used.
Wallas described stages you can put on a schedule. Amabile treated processes and motivation as trainable. The OECD calls the competence malleable and assessable in 15-year-olds. Talent is uneven. That does not imply that practice is pointless.
These pages sit next to the same problem: how to get a new idea without losing the job the idea had to do.

Divergent Thinking

Generates many options. Creative Thinking uses that pass, then asks which options are also useful.

Convergent Thinking

Narrows options toward a workable answer. The second half of Creative Thinking depends on it.

Lateral Thinking

A method for leaving the old path. It is one tool inside Creative Thinking, and the two are not the same thing.

Design Thinking

Tests new ideas against a user’s actual need. Empathy and prototypes are one way to check fit.

Analytical Thinking

Names parts and joints. Creative Thinking often starts from that map, then assembles it again.

Analogical Thinking

Imports a pattern from another domain. It is often used to seek novelty, and it still has to pass a usefulness test.

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One-Line Takeaway

A wild idea is not yet creative work. Generate more than one, keep only what is new and useful, and change it until it does the job.