Intuition is more important than logic; mistakes are good; nobody can predict the future or reason the root causes of past events. While these concepts sound like the makings of an Esalen workshop or self-help retreat, they were, in fact, the basis of a speech delivered by a West Point colonel.
On August 17, the Chautauqua Institution invited Col. Casey Haskins to the podium as part of their weeklong lecture series, “Sparking a Culture of Creativity and Innovation.” So unusual was the nature of this military man’s talk — “6 Myths That Block Creative Thinking” – that it had to be prefaced by a disclaimer: “What I say is my opinion and I am not speaking for the government or the Army, which may or may not approve.”
Haskins, director of the Department of Military Instruction at West Point, has spearheaded innovative ways to train cadets to be flexible thinkers and leaders on the battlefield.
The colonel began with a story about monkeys, the gist of which was that “we have certain things that we do that may, once upon a time, have made sense in a particular set of circumstances, but probably don’t make sense today, and still we do them.” He went on to define these things as “flaws in our operating system,” or myths that hinder our creativity.
Myth number one, said Haskins, is the idea that people think logically, not intuitively. According to Haskins, “logic is lazy” and we don’t use it until we’ve exhausted our intuition. We feel the answer before we employ logic. “We actually use intuition in all decisions and we use logic in some decisions,” he said. Ideally, we should use logic to train our intuition. Training intuition, he said, is just as important for engendering creativity as training logic.
Another myth Haskins addressed: We know why things happen. “Why did the stock market go all the way up and all the way down every day last week? The answer is, no one knows,” he said. “However, I can point you to 25 well-dressed, highly paid people who speak with great authority every afternoon about it.” It turns out we live in a complex world where causes and effects aren’t often clear. Believing that they are “locks us in to our belief that a particular future is the future, and thereby prevents creativity.” Creative progress is iterative, and doesn’t happen in a vacuum, he insisted.
Haskins went on to debunk other creativity-stoppers like “Education works in isolation” and “Mistakes are bad.” In the end the path to creativity, in his mind, boils down to just ignoring what “the monkeys in front of us did.”
Watch Col. Casey Haskins: 6 Myths That Block Creative Thinking on-demand at FORA.tv.