IntroductionTHE BARKING CAT What would you think of someone who
said, “I would like to have a cat, provided it barked”? The
common desire to be creative, provided it’s something that can
be easily willed or wished, is precisely equivalent. The
thinking techniques that lead to creativity are no less rigid
than the biological principles that determine the
characteristics of cats. Creativity is not an accident, not
something that is genetically determined. It is not a result of
some easily learned magic trick or secret, but a consequence of
your intention to be creative and your determination to learn
and use creative-thinking strategies. The illustration below
shows the word “FLOP,” which we all know and understand. Look at
it again. Can you see anything else? Once we see the word
“FLOP,” we tend to exclude all other possibilities, despite the
strange shapes of the letters. Yet if you look at the “O” in
flop, you can see a white “I.” Now if you read the white
outlines as letters with the “I,” you will see the w