Michael Michalko and the book ‘Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques’

Creativity is a way of thinking that can be learned. The notion of this hasn’t exactly been my best asset, and I’ve never really understood why. I’ve haven’t been supported by people that understood it in a way that helps me understand how to challenge me in ways that led to more fundamental creativity. I came to Michael Michalko‘s Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques as a means to approach this idea directly.

(Michael Michalko wrote Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques, including the expanded second edition that is the object of this review).

The best thing that Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques gives you, in fact gave me, was a framework with ideas for how to approach situations from perspectives that are within my reach. For example, an approach the book advocates is the technique of Cherry Split, which is demonstrated well with an example by online publishing platform Medium, located at medium.com. The process calls for iteratively splitting the challenge into smaller attributes until you have enough points to think productively. Working through each attribute one at a time, think of ways to change and improve them into ways that can become something worth pursuing.

(The Cherry Split technique for developing a creative solution to marketing a sports magazine, as shown by an example from Medium).

The notion of identifying a marketing segment that can be marketed as sports for young athletes and children, the idea was to create a children’s magazine for exactly that market. Not only is there a new market for a new product, young athletes theoretically will later subscribe to the adult version of the magazine as they age out of the children’s content. This notion, if it works, would place a cherry with whip cream on top of the shake of this technique.

Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques by Michael Michalko offers this among many other productive techniques to help people become more productive thinkers with similar yet tens of ideas that highlight different ways to execute on problems creatively. I found the many sparks illuminating, and look forward to the fruit of the approaches that are parts of my toolkit now that I have come across this book. I rate Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques by Michael Michalko at 4.00-stars on a scale of one-to-five.

Matt – Saturday, August 1, 2020