Move Beyond the Past to Enhance Creative Thinking

“We can’t live in the past. If we are stuck in the past, I believe we destroy our creativity, we destroy our imagination to do things differently, and we destroy our own inner peace of mind.” – Mairead Corrigan-Maguire, cofounder of Peace People, Nobel Peace Prize winner in Spirituality & Health, March-April 2009, p. 64

How often do you hear in meetings: “We tried that before. It didn’t work.”?  That kind of thinking keeps people, teams and organizations living in the past and, in effect, destroys the space for creativity. It shuts people down from generating options that might work.

Consider instead that the conditions and people involved today may  be different from “back then”.  How might you engage what is now, what is current, to generate ideas and move forward?  How might you step out of the past to engage the imagination of yourself and others to think differently about the current situation to move forward?

Additional questions to consider:

• What did you learn about the “last time”?
  • What aspects worked well?
  • Which ones did not work well?
  • Why?
• What were the conditions at that time?
  • How are they same or different from now?
  • How might you apply learning from before to what you are attempting to do now?

Learning from the past is important in moving forward.  Being stuck in the past blocks forward movement.  Which one will you choose?