# The Creative Thinking Skill: What It Is, Its Types, and How to Learn It Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/creative-thinking-skill/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/creative-thinking-skill.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving decision-making at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Creative thinking skill means finding new or better answers to real problems. Learn its types (divergent, convergent, lateral) and how to build and show it. ## Key facts - Title: The Creative Thinking Skill: What It Is, Its Types, and How to Learn It - Category: Types of Skills - Primary skill: Decision-Making - Related skills: Influence, Building Confidence - Primary keyword: creative thinking skill - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/creative-thinking-skill/ ## What this page covers - Creative thinking skill means finding new or better answers to real problems. Learn its types (divergent, convergent, lateral) and how to build and show it. - Practical guidance for creative thinking skill - How this topic connects to Decision-Making ## Detailed explanation Creative thinking skill is the ability to find new or better approaches to real problems: widening the options before settling on one, judging which idea actually fits, and sometimes questioning how the problem was framed in the first place. At work it has little to do with artistic talent, and it can be learned. That may come as a surprise if you have always filed yourself under "not the creative type." The people who seem to have a steady supply of good ideas are rarely drawing on a special gift. Mostly, they run a few distinct kinds of thinking in a sensible order, and each one can be practiced. ## What creative thinking means at work In a workplace, creative thinking means developing a new or better solution to an actual problem. A faster way to produce a weekly report, a clearer way to show figures to a client, a workaround when the usual route is blocked: all of it counts. If you are heading into finance, engineering, administration or IT, the distinction matters. It is easy to assume the skill belongs to designers and artists, and then to overlook, never practice and never mention the creative thinking you already do. It is also not one talent. A research report from the International Baccalaureate describes creative thinking as a complex skill that draws on several others: [critical thinking](/knowledge/decision-making/critical-thinking/), communication, curiosity, collaboration and persistence. The reason is practical. An idea only becomes useful after it has been generated, tested, refined and shared, and each of those steps calls on something different. Someone who believes they lack creativity is usually missing one or two parts of that process, not the whole of it, and a missing part can be built. ## The types of creative thinking Creative thinking works through a few distinct modes, and knowing them turns "be more creative" from a vague instruction into something you can actually do. Three of them are ways of thinking about a problem. The fourth is the set of capabilities that turns ideas into results. ### Divergent thinking The psychologist J. P. Guilford coined the term. Divergent thinking means exploring many possible solutions in a short time and drawing unexpected connections between them. Two of its best-known measures are fluency, meaning how many alternatives you come up with, and flexibility, meaning how many different kinds. The most common way creative thinking fails at work is stopping at the first answer that would do. Divergent thinking is the countermeasure. Say your team's shared folder is always a mess. The first idea is usually "write a naming rule." Push for ten options before judging any of them, then check their variety: if they are all rules, add a different kind, such as changing who owns the folder, changing the tool, or asking whether the folder needs to exist at all. Judging comes later. During this step the only job is to create choices. ### Convergent thinking Guilford also named the counterpart. Convergent thinking aims at the single best answer: where divergent thinking creates choices, convergent thinking eliminates options and makes one. The two are complementary, and good [creative problem-solving](/knowledge/types-of-skills/problem-solver-skill/) alternates between them instead of relying on either alone. For someone early in their career, convergent thinking is what makes an idea credible. Test each option against what the situation actually requires: the time it takes, what it costs, who it affects and what could go wrong. Arriving with one [well-tested proposal](/knowledge/influence/pitching-ideas/), and the alternatives already weighed, gets a very different hearing from arriving with a long list of raw ideas. Colleagues can say yes to the first; the second hands them your thinking to finish. ### Lateral thinking Edward de Bono introduced the term in 1967, in his book *New Think*. He called lateral thinking generative and ordinary step-by-step logic, which he called vertical thinking, selective, and he insisted that both are needed because each does what the other cannot. For de Bono, divergent thinking is only one part of lateral thinking, which is about escaping the established way of looking at a problem. In practice, this means a breakthrough often comes from questioning the question. "How do we get this report out faster?" invites answers about speed. "Who reads this report, and what do they need from it?" might reveal that half of it can go. Before generating ideas, restate the problem two or three different ways and notice which version opens up the most room. ### Supporting dispositions Generating ideas is necessary but not enough. Even the claim that divergent or lateral thinking is the heart of creativity is disputed among creativity researchers. Ideas also have to be judged against what the situation requires, which is why critical thinking and persistence belong to the skill as much as imagination does. Each supporting disposition does a specific job. Curiosity makes you ask why something is done the way it is, which is where many improvements start. Collaboration brings in angles you would not reach alone. Communication lets you explain an idea so others can see its value. Persistence carries an idea through the first round of objections and the rework that usually follows. Treat creative thinking as brainstorming volume and you get plenty of ideas and few that anyone adopts. Treat it as the whole sequence and the ideas start to land. ## Why employers value creative thinking skill The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2023 ranked creative thinking as the second most important skill for workers, just behind analytical thinking. The pairing says a lot. Employers want people who can both take a problem apart and come up with new ways to solve it, which is why creative thinking turns up in job ads and interview questions. It is also why a vague claim does not carry much weight. Anyone can type "creative thinker" on a resume. What persuades is an example that shows the process. Describe a real problem, the options you considered, the one you chose and why, and what changed as a result. Coursework, part-time jobs, volunteering and student organizations all supply material. [In an interview](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/soft-skills-interview-questions/), tell the story the same way and make the middle visible: how you widened the options, how you narrowed them, and, if it fits, one thing you would do differently next time. Before you put the phrase on an application, it is worth knowing which of your work skills will hold it up when an interviewer probes. Taking a few minutes to [see which skills back it up](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) gives you honest examples to build on, and anything that comes out weaker becomes something to practice rather than something to hide. ## How to develop creative thinking skill Creative thinking was once thought to be a skill that could not be learned. A literature review by the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment reports that it can be developed, and that teachers and mentors can be trained to encourage it, assess it and use that assessment to help individuals improve. It is a set of processes you can practice, not a trait you are stuck with. So the useful question is not "am I creative?" but "which part of the process do I practice next?" A few habits cover the whole sequence: - Set an idea quota. Before judging anything, write down more options than feels necessary, then check whether they are all the same kind. - Keep the two passes apart. Generate first, evaluate second. Mixing them kills unusual ideas before they have been thought through. - Restate the problem. Ask the question at least one other way before you commit to answering it. - Test against real constraints. Check each surviving idea against time, cost and the people it affects before you share it. - Stay with it after a no. A rejected idea often needs reworking rather than abandoning, and the second version is often stronger. Doing the widening with other people helps too, because they reach options you would not. Colleagues who started at the same time as you are an easy place to begin: they share your fresh view of the organization without the pressure of a formal meeting. > Build a small community with other young people who started around the same time. Then you can bounce ideas off each other — and a group like that may also be better placed to suggest things. That was one of the young people we interviewed about starting work, giving her advice for a first job; the wording comes from our notes of the conversation rather than her exact words. The second half of her point matters as much as the first. An idea that has already survived a few colleagues' questions is in better shape by the time it reaches the person who decides. ## What turns a good idea into one that gets used Look at where creative thinking tends to stall early in a career, and a shortage of ideas is rarely the problem. More often the first option gets chosen too quickly, a promising idea is raised in a way nobody can say yes to, or it never gets said out loud at all. Each of those moments has its own remedy. **Decision-Making** gives the widening and narrowing a method. Its techniques for deciding with others double as tools for generating options: recruit differing opinions on purpose, gather everyone's ideas independently before discussing them so the first voice does not set the direction, ask someone to play devil's advocate, invite the quieter people in, and split into smaller groups when you need more divergent thinking. It also names the traps that end creative thinking too early, such as anchoring on the first idea mentioned and confirmation bias, which steers you toward evidence for the option you already prefer. **Influence** is what carries an idea from your head to the people who can act on it. It starts with initiative: being willing to ask, and volunteering to prepare the proposal instead of waiting to be invited. Then comes the pitch: working out what the idea offers the people who must say yes, using a concrete example, and naming its drawbacks yourself, which makes you more credible, not less. When a full yes is unlikely, a small trial still counts. Each idea delivered well builds the reputation that gets the next one a fair hearing. **Building Confidence** gets an untested idea said out loud. If you tend to hold back an unusual suggestion because it might sound foolish, this is the skill that changes that, and it is built by doing rather than by talking yourself into it. Step a little outside your comfort zone, perhaps a small suggestion in a team meeting before a bigger one with your manager, and accept the nerves rather than waiting for them to pass. When an idea falls flat, ask whether that always happens, whether everything went wrong and whether it was really all down to you. All three respond to practice, though few people need to work on every one at once; usually a single skill is the bottleneck. Each of them sits among the **twelve work skills** the free **Job Skills Test** scores, which makes the test a quick way to [find your bottleneck skill](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) and start practicing where it counts. ## The creative thinking you already do Think about the last time a task annoyed you enough that you found a better way to do it: a quicker route through a tedious spreadsheet at a part-time job, or a group assignment that finally made sense once someone asked what it was really for. That was creative thinking in action, whether or not you would have called it that. Building on it does not mean turning into a different kind of person. It means practicing the steps you currently skip, and those gaps close with use. Later roles bring more problems that nobody has solved before, so the skill counts for more with every step up; the good news is that each small problem between now and then is practice. What remains is choosing which step to work on first. ## See which skill to practice first That leaves one practical step: finding out where you stand today. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills. In 7 minutes it shows how you score across all twelve skills it measures, including the three that decide whether your ideas get used, and which ones would make the biggest difference for you right now. ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Creative thinking skill means finding new or better answers to real problems. Learn its types (divergent, convergent, lateral) and how to build and show it. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Decision-Making. It also relates to Influence, Building Confidence. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/decision-making.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/confidence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/creative-thinking-skill/ Preferred summary: "Creative thinking skill means finding new or better answers to real problems. Learn its types (divergent, convergent, lateral) and how to build and show it." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.