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4 • Flexibility

Creative flexibility is a willingness to consider a wide variety of approaches to a problem. Instead of obstinately freezing onto one particular idea or approach, the flexible person starts out by remembering that if his first solution won't work, he can always back off and approach the problem from another angle.

Flexibility also helps the creative person "roll with the punches'* in the development of his idea. In this sense, it has been compared to the "change of pace" used by an athlete. A businessman may be doing a good business on a particular line, with his production, selling, and costs all in a neat ratio, when a sudden shift in public tastes causes an increased demand for the product. A nonflexible mind might hit the panic button in attempts to cope with the upset in the nicely balanced and controlled ratio. A flexible person moves swiftly to switch his thinking into a new gear to ac­commodate the changes.

Flexibility is also what gives researchers and others that ability to capitalize on the "accidents" we considered in Chapter 2. Since they are flexible in their thinking, they are able to switch their efforts to a more promising discovery if what they are actually looking for continues to be elusive.

Flexibility, of course, is invaluable to the businessman. The administrative executive is not a scientist working in a laboratory with precisely controlled ingredients which he can vary at will in exactly the desired quantities. The businessman is dealing always with people—either the people in his plant, or the people he is dependent upon to sell his product or service, or the people he is counting on to buy his product. And people are not precisely measurable and predictable quantities. Nor are the economic conditions under which he must operate his business or his depart­ment. Therefore, the business executive lives in an unpredictable world, where his best-laid plans may be upset by a newspaper headline, a sudden change in the weather, or a line foreman who lost his temper and caused a wildcat strike on the production line.

The symptoms of flexibility are usually easy to observe in others. The quality may be difficult to acquire in your own think­ing. The man who sits in a conference or meeting, listening to others "kick a problem around" and sell themselves on what was perhaps the only idea to be produced, and then upsets all the thinking by asking, "Well, what else could we do?" is at least manifesting an inclination toward flexibility.

On the other hand, the person who early in a problem or meet­ing proposes one idea and one idea alone, and then "fights for it" right down the line, without giving an inch—sometimes, even after it has been conclusively demonstrated that his idea won't work!—is manifesting an unfortunate lack of flexibility.

The person who can seriously consider several possible ap­proaches to a problem solution, each probably being "sold" by its originator, and then, and seemingly out of the blue, propose still another approach that none of the others had even thought of, is exhibiting flexibility.

Actually, flexibility may be closely related to fluency of ideas, in so far as the ability to think up different approaches is con­cerned. It is certain that the person who contributes twenty or thirty ideas as possibilities will have a better chance of having at least two or three basic approaches in his list than will the person who produces only two or three ideas in the first place. In trying to develop or improve your own flexibility, this fact may give you some help. By deliberately searching out different directions or approaches to your problem solution, and setting some sort of quantity goal for each, chances are you will be able to acquire the habit of starting to think "around" any problem when it first presents itself.

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