 and welcome to The Creative Life, a collaborative production between Think Tech Hawaii and the American Creativity Association. Dr. Brian Barnes joins us today from Louisville, Kentucky, where Dr. Barnes is a professor of philosophy at the University of Louisville. He is also a renowned scholar at the Foundation for Critical Thinking. Today we shall focus on Dr. Barnes' role at the Foundation, especially as we explore some of the major structures in our thinking as they relate to criticality and creativity. Very simply, our overarching question for the framework of our discussion is, and one thing critically without thinking creatively or, and one thing creatively without thinking critically. So Dr. Barnes, just to get us started, how might you and your colleagues at the Foundation for Critical Thinking define critical thinking? Hey, Darlene, thanks so much for having me and for allowing me to represent the Foundation on today's show. I'm really happy to be here. We're happy to have you with us. Thank you, thank you. In terms of critical thinking, there's so many ways to define critical thinking. I like this one, thinking about your thinking while you're thinking in order to improve your thinking. So we're trying to develop skills for our thinking such that we can bring them in real time to the problems of living and be able to come up with our best thinking when we really need it, instead of on the drive home or later on in the shower thinking, ah, I should have thought about it this way. Thinking about your thinking in real time. I wonder how many of us do that? Clearly we do think in real time, obviously, but I wonder how many of us to the portion you're mentioning, think about how we're doing that. How about giving this a try too before we get started since being a philosopher, you know we must clarify the concept, right? So how would you define creativity? When I think of creativity, I think about someone or even perhaps something. We have a lot of creativity, perhaps with artificial intelligence these days and maybe even in the animal world. I think about the ability to imaginatively bring something new into existence, whether that's a process or a product or maybe just an idea. So creativity for me involves some kind of a process of bringing a new thing into being. I think, and let me know what you think about this. I mean, often when we mention the word new with creativity, sometimes folks will start to think that it has to be something revolutionary, new, completely new, but might you be thinking as sometimes I do that you could be looking at something that already exists in a different way, maybe perhaps breaking it down into its parts and then reconceptualizing it into a new thing. What do you think about that? Yeah, absolutely. When we talk about any idea or any object, nothing exists in a vacuum. We can't even understand what something is unless related to other things, right? I mean, everything, every idea exists in its relationship to other ideas and every product or service that we have, every object in our environment is something that we relate to in terms of concepts and those mental features. So yeah, I mean, I think derivative knowledge can still be new. I can come up with a new way to think about my coffee grounds if I'm at a coffee shop, right? Like what do you do? You throw them away, we don't need those things anymore. Well, you can think about what might we do with them? Like maybe turn them back into soil so we can grow food or something like that. That would be maybe a new concept for me but definitely one that's related to the trash that was already there. It's just a matter of finding the angles. How can I control my responses to the material that's already in my head such that I can cause it to maybe flower in a new direction? It makes a lot of sense to me and I think it probably does to our viewers too. It's quite a nice start. Since we're here to talk about, you're on the creative life and if time permits, we have to talk about how creatively you live in your life. But what parts of the whole scheme out of thinking critically or critical thinking? How do you think that relates to creativity or how much is usable, interchangeable? Well, it's all valuable in there. I mean, for us, there are a number of important structures. We might really look at five pieces of the critical thinking process which is too much for people to just grab really quickly. But if I may, one of the things that we can do is we can break our thinking into pieces. And for our critical thinking system deriving from the work mainly of Dr. Richard Paul and Dr. Linda Helder, few other important folks in there like Gerald Nosich at the Foundation for Critical Thinking, we think that there are probably eight basic structures that are involved in thinking and that I can drill down into those structures anytime I want to in order to find out, in case I don't know, what the big questions are on this topic, what my purpose is with this topic, what my assumptions are about the topic, what the implications are if I succeed or fail with this endeavor. So the analysis part can really help me with creativity because maybe what I wanna do is change my purpose toward one that will get a very different outcome. Maybe I wanna take the same old set of ideas and I wanna run them through a whole different theoretical point of view such that maybe I would organize them differently to potentially achieve different outcomes. A lot of times we do this with analogy, we think, oh, this process is maybe like one that I'm not doing right now, but I read about it in the Harvard Business Review or whatever. So maybe we give it a try for our industry or for our business activity or for our creative outlet and see how that goes. So just being able to break my thinking into pieces such that I could look at each piece and determine if it's what I want or what I don't want and really help my creative process. Another thing that happens when I'm being creative is that I'm often, I'm in a position where I need to judge the products as I'm creating them. Do I wanna continue to go in this direction? Is this satisfying the purpose that I have? Are the various constituents of this project being represented the way that I want them to be? And that takes some method of evaluation. And so we have some intellectual standards that we think people should take a look at, creative processes of any type, whether they're what we might call critical thinking type stuff or whether it's something as creatively common as someone sketching a cartoon on a paper napkin or something, we can determine whether I'm conveying the ideas I wanna convey here clearly with precision in a deep or a shallow way, in a logical or an illogical way and a number of other standards. That's, those are two of the five. We also have characteristics that people can use to help train themselves, to have certain intellectual habits as opposed to others. We have strategies for people avoiding irrational and unconscious biases in their thinking. And then the fifth part that I would point to is an overarching structural system such that if I wanted to create critical thinking mechanisms for my work that would assist me in my work, whether it's in my institution or whether it's in my own personal thinking, I could do that with this system of guided structured criticality that we have. We call it polarities. Anyway, five pieces. Okay, so it seems to me and to many others that automatically with creativity, it seems to be a commendation. We don't say, we usually say, that's great. You're so creative or it was such a creative production. Very rarely do you hear, oh, he's so creative with an angry mind or an angry expression. Why do you think that is? I think that we often wanna encourage people to be creative because we see that as an opportunity for them to improve their thinking or their performance in some way. We see inspiration as being really positive, right? And I don't know. I mean, I think in my own life, a lot of times people have encouraged my creativity even when I didn't produce the right thing because they saw that I was using creative structures. I was going into a creative space. I was doing something that was maybe different from what was already on the table. And so even if it wasn't exactly the right thing, maybe I was being encouraged because I was doing a thing that was perceived as being novel. And I think in many cases, especially when we talk about something like business innovation or educational processes, we often I think value novelty so that we can test it. So that maybe we can get to something no one's gotten to before that'll be even better than where we've been. And so I think there's a little bit of hope that goes on when you see people being creative that comes out and we really wanna encourage that hopefulness, even if it's not technically, the best product. You mentioned, you did this now. You mentioned your creative space. Where do you go for your creative space? Tell me more about that. Well, I do a number of creative things. One of the important ones in my life is I practice a Japanese martial art that's been around for over 200 years. It's called a Hontai Ocean Ryu, which I don't expect anybody to remember, but it's a traditional Japanese martial arts system and it has weapons and it has jujitsu. And you learn the basics of the system and then it allows you to be incredibly creative in your physical expressions of those activities. I find it to be really refreshing, small changes in the ways that you move can lead to big outcomes. And so that's one of the creative spaces that I go to a lot. I also, in a more mental space, I enjoy humor and I explore humor quite a bit in terms of sharing humor with my friends, coming up with humorous word play. Maybe sometimes I'll make little songs. I'm always trying to be sort of spontaneously creative with music in ways that will entertain and maybe can provide insight. I don't do a good job of bringing this into my classwork, but it's something that I find to be personally a really delightful outlet throughout my day. You mentioned business and if I'm correct, you've written a book, a textbook for business? Business ethics, I have, yep, yep, business ethics. And how did, well, I suppose if it's business ethics, critical thinking played an important role in the development of your content. It did, it did. It brought me the opportunity to apply a lot of critical thinking processes from the Foundation for Critical Thinking into some business activities where they normally don't get applied. I do a lot of business consulting with groups that want to maybe look at their innovative processes. They want to look at their leadership team. They maybe want to look at decisions around growth or something like that. But very rarely does anybody want to talk very much about ethics or ethical development or the development of the corporate culture. And so what I was trying to do with my textbook was to show how some of these critical thinking processes can help us think differently about our corporate culture, particularly to identify the places where corporate cultures can perhaps lead to harms to some kinds of stakeholder groups or maybe when they can hold us back. Some of our maybe business activities might hold us back from really being able to identify our own values and being the best kind of ethical thinker that we can be. I mean, it's an open question how much of this is actually a day-to-day problem for folks. But I will say that when I bring up business ethics very often in my consulting, people don't find it to be very comfortable. They're not often ready to explore this as much as they are some other applications of something like critical thinking. I think it's that there, this comfort comes from that it's a new process for them or is it because they fear the leadership or the authority that they're working with? Those personalities? I think it's both. I think it's both. When people are able to talk about it, sometimes the leaders aren't in the room who would really need to make the kinds of decisions that we might be contemplating at this point if we're gonna talk about corporate ethics. Sometimes there are obvious conflicts between what we might talk about in the foundation for critical thinking between something like fair-mindedness, the idea that I might be willing to take all viewpoints as having equal intellectual value until I hear them and actually evaluate them. It's too easy just to ignore points of view out of hand. That's Jones and accounting and we don't wanna hear from Jones today. So when I'm being fair-minded, often it goes against established protocols. It goes against sometimes our corporate culture and it might undermine some of our motives, particularly if what we wanna do is get the upper hand on our competition or maybe work some people out of our organization who we don't feel are a good fit. And so when we start talking about these things, some people are very concerned that we might easily slip over into something like a legal area, right? And they don't wanna be involved for us somehow saying something that's gonna be actionable later on. And it's delicate, of course, because of the important crossover between thinking about something like ethics and business and just thinking about our best thinking general. So it seems that you're talking about those concepts that really present some barriers. Would that be right? That they present some barriers to creative thought? There are some, we talk in particular about two barriers, egocentric thinking and sociocentric thinking. Egocentric thinking, broadly speaking, for us at the foundation is the set of barriers that I give myself from sort of observing the world around me and seeing what seems to work. And in an uninformed or maybe partially informed way, I start adopting practices that seem like they'll work out, but nobody really told me to. As opposed to the sociocentric ones, which are the suggestions, the explicit suggestions in many cases I get from culture, from my church, from my coworkers, from my family about how I should live my life and what the values are I should be undertaking. When you start to challenge those things, I mean, people get so uncomfortable, particularly when you're at work because no one wants to do something like expose themselves in some way that might cause them to lose their job. I mean, there's a really big problem within critical thinking, which is how much of my best thinking should I share? Because in some cases, if I share a lot of my best thinking, particularly if it's about something like the way we should be conducting ourselves in the marketplace or in our corporate culture, maybe that has negative implications for me somewhere down the line in terms of my bread, right? And nobody wants to put that in jeopardy. And so I think that there is a lot of discomfort because people know they're willing to accept almost every time that these hidden biases are there. But I got to be a vice president with these hidden biases. So why uncover them now? Understandably. I think we've talked about this before on the show that the conflict that's caused by having someone in a position of authority who is not an authority and those working with or on that team recognize that, but yet there's still that fear to go against that person's idea or thought. Sure, sure. Also, of course, sometimes the strategies that are put forth to us at work are not strategies that I would employ outside of work. But maybe sometimes there's a dissonance there because maybe the leadership that I'm giving or the leadership that I'm getting, even if it is legitimate, even if I do see it as maybe important, maybe I don't feel like it's serving a set of values that I would want to emulate when I'm not doing the work. And so depending on my industry, of course, depending on the kinds of things that I have to do for work, maybe that's more important to some folks than others. But definitely my leadership team, one would hope, would be invested in the kinds of intellectual characteristics that would promote the best thinking across the board. I mean, wouldn't we hope that the best thinking at work is also just the best thinking? That the people who are, in fact, these superstars making gazillions of dollars out there, wouldn't it be great if we thought they were, in fact, the best thinkers across the board such that we could trust them for all kinds of decision-making? Unfortunately, it seems like there's a lot of situations where leaders in one area just don't seem to be able to think strongly in other areas. Maybe, for example, if I'm really great at making money versus being really great at solving problems of homelessness and poverty, right? It's just the knowledge transfer doesn't always work. And so depending on the kinds of values that I really want to promote in my life, some of the thinking at work just might not be really appropriate for getting me there. And that's scary, I think, for a lot of people. It is scary. Yeah. It is very scary. Yeah. And it also promotes creativity, by the way, though, right? Because a lot of people, especially when I talk to them, they report something like, I can't use this stuff at work, but I'm thinking a lot about it outside of work, right? And then unfortunately, I don't often get to follow up with them enough to figure out if that eventually bled back into work. But it is interesting sometimes how much people are willing to take this stuff to a place they see that's obviously a place for them to improve their thinking at home or on the neighborhood council or at the PTA or with the lawn, whatever they're doing there or something, but work is scarier. So as I listened to some of your responses through this session, the idea of martial arts, if I understand correctly, that's one of your go-to places. So in the remarks that you just shared in these last minute or so, for, do you think it's, it probably is helpful for us all to have a place to go and it may not be the Japanese swords that you mentioned. I don't think that would be my preference, but somewhere and also probably for me to interact with other human beings outside of the workplace. Sure. What do you think? Well, I think we definitely need creative outlets. I think whatever that is, and I think that any of us can bring to our own mentation a creativity that can then be transferred into activity such that we could enjoy it. So maybe I think, oh, I really wouldn't enjoy bowling, but maybe under the right conditions and with the right people, maybe I would enjoy bowling. Maybe you think, oh, I don't wanna learn something that's gonna be so significantly kind of stiff and maybe one way like a martial arts system or something like that. I want something that's gonna give me more flexibility. But when we learn different creative activities, whether it's knitting or whether it's using Japanese swords or whether it's throwing a Frisbee, it gives us a foundation that we can use to be creative physically. And what happens is so often, we ignore the mental part of that. We don't even notice that there's a mental part in there. We just see that, oh, look, I did a different thing when I knitted this time and I got a different outcome, not really approaching it like, oh, I thought differently about knitting this time. And I think that that just gets more, I think there's a really great multiplier effect when you start to share this with other knitters. So when you get out there with other people who are doing the same activities and then somebody goes, wow, I've never thought about doing it like that or gosh, I haven't seen anybody do that since my grandma did it or whatever. And the same thing of course can happen in the workplace, but when we have, I think, dedicated activities like knitting, like sword work, like basketball, I don't know what people have, baking perhaps. I think when we have these kinds of dedicated activities, it gives us a space where we're authorized to be creative and where then we can allow the creativity to really blossom in directions that, if we were doing it at work and if we were maybe just doing it by ourselves without seeing the interactions of others and everything, maybe we wouldn't have quite so much foment, right? But it's really great when we can feel empowered and autonomous and also supported by even the smallest of communities in order to pursue that new thing. And if it ends up being a mess, well, if nothing else, I have a great story about that one time I tried to get outside the box, you know? I do think it really matters for that. And it probably matters to know what the box is too. Of course, yeah, we need that foundation, right, right. Which leads me to another question I have for you. It seems to many of us that when we talk about creativity or a creative problem solving model, that clearly there's some kind of problem involved. And especially in business situations and team building situations, the forced need to get the team together to work on this problem. But more often than not, the direction if the solution is not practical or one that can be implemented that perhaps the wrong problem has been identified. So how does your work at the foundation, because I know also that foundation you're going to bring up those strategies to solve problems. So what can you share about that? Well, I mean, we have, we certainly privilege bringing in multiple points of view. We privilege the idea that my first pass at a problem is probably not going to capture the complexity and all the dynamic elements of that problem, particularly if it's something at work. So I want to be comfortable with a culture of questioning such that whatever features of the problem are being identified, there's a constant loop back to where we can go back and check them again in terms of new information, whether it be new conceptual information, new process information, new data, whatever it might be. We want to have sort of some mechanism where I'm comfortable going back and looking at these things again. And if I'm sure about my purpose and it's a straight line to get there, that's one thing. We probably don't need much critical thinking process if that's what we're doing. But if there's a lot of disagreement about the direction we should go to, then we probably could do a little work with questions, purposes and points of view. Maybe we need to look at the implications and consequences of the activity that we're doing. Maybe actually everybody's closer than we think and we just need to make some things a little more precise or we just need to ask a few more questions or maybe we just need to dig in to some of the people's assumptions about what any of this means. I mean, there are all kinds of different interventions that we might make. All of those that I just mentioned right now save one were analytic what we would call mental analysis where I can break the problem into pieces. And then also again, I can use a certain set of high quality intellectual standards to make sure that whatever I'm doing fits precisely with those purposes, points of view, consequences that I've identified for this project. Having a process to go back to, it takes longer. And that's one reason some people shy away from it, but I think it's indispensable if you can't just solve the problem, which is why we would be looking at this at all. So in the few minutes that we have that remain, I wonder if you can share with us, get a little bit more personal because you really are a good example of someone that is living a creative life, at least as high view in the few chats I've had with you and what I read about you. And there's one that surprised me, but I also thought it was a great idea. You're a comic book. What can you tell me about your comic books? Or tell other viewers? Sure, about 10 years ago, I wrote a grant to create a critical thinking comic book series. They're called Adventures in Critical Thinking. There are six of them that were published by the Delphi Center at the University of Louisville. And people can pick up PDFs of those if they contact the Delphi Center. They're ready to be printed in comic book format if they want, but essentially what those were is they were student written and student illustrated. So I brought together teams of different students, all of whom had had critical thinking class with me and they had to come up with a scenario that they could use our critical thinking method at the foundation for critical thinking to think through. And so the purpose of the comic books is in addition to being a creative outlet for the students and for me, is that anybody who has one of these comic books can use the educational mechanisms in the comic books. There's some color coding, for example, there's some page referencing where you can go back and look at some theory related to the examples you're looking at. Those mechanisms are in there so that anyone can use the comic book to teach themselves high quality critical thinking using the different stories in those comic books as the example. These are high quality comic books. I had the opportunity, I think, since you make them available online. So I would encourage our viewers to take a look at those comic books. They're not only fun, but they truly, now I understand the background, as you explained it a little bit better and they really demonstrate the use of critical thinking and I can see it working very nicely with students. And they've been great to have. Well, thank you to everyone for joining us today and thank you, Dr. Barnes, for being with us. And I really think we've thoroughly enjoyed your commentary today. And on behalf of myself and Dr. Barnes, we hope that our discussion enables our viewers to be more mentally creative and focused at work or anywhere else. Join us in viewing the creative life in two weeks until then, aloha.