Creativity in MS/OR: Value-focused thinking-Creativity directed toward decision making

The purpose of creative thinking is to develop novel and unusual ideas. These ideas could be objectives, problem definitions, or solution alternatives. To succeed, one must follow the two most important rules for creative thinking: defer judgment, and produce large quantities of ideas. By deferring judgment, one avoids self-criticism, which is the most detrimental psychological block to being creative. One must be able to separate imagination from judgment. The logic of ‘quantity first’ is simple: the more ideas one has, the better they are likely to be. One key principle of creative thinking that differs from those for conventional problem solving is to separate idea generation from idea evaluation and idea selection. In this paper, ‘value-focused thinking’ is proposed, as a means of generating alternatives for decision problems and of identifying decision opportunities where time and effort could be productively invested.