Creative thinking: what a brick, a paperclip and 20 statements can tell you

Take an ordinary brick and list everything it could be used for. Most people start with building a wall, then a doorstop, then a paperweight, and slow down after five or six ideas. A few keep going: a step, a weapon, a pestle for grinding spices, a heat store wrapped in a towel. Tasks like this one have been used to study creativity for over seventy years.

Our Creative Thinking Assessment does not ask you to list uses for a brick. It asks how you usually think and act when ideas are needed. That difference matters for how you read your result.

Divergent thinking and how researchers test it

In 1950 the psychologist J. P. Guilford used his address as president of the American Psychological Association to argue that psychology had neglected creativity. He later separated convergent thinking, which finds the one correct answer, from divergent thinking, which produces many possible answers to an open question. The unusual uses task is one of his ways of measuring the second kind.

E. Paul Torrance built on this work. His Tests of Creative Thinking, first published in 1966, give people short verbal and drawing tasks and score the answers for fluency (how many ideas), flexibility (how many different kinds of idea), originality (how rare the ideas are) and elaboration (how much detail they carry). These are performance tests, where someone counts and rates what you actually produced.

What our test asks

Our test has 20 statements, five for each of four parts: Openness to Ideas, Thinking Flexibility, Imagination and Exploration, and Creative Risk-Taking. You rate each statement on a five-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree.

Examples include "I often come up with unconventional solutions to problems." and "I would rather risk failure than never try." Four statements are scored in reverse, such as "I find it hard to change my mind once I have made a decision." and "I worry about criticism of my creative ideas." Agreeing with those lowers your score in that part.

We wrote the 20 statements ourselves, inspired by the work of Guilford and Torrance. Their tests measure what you produce, and ours asks how you see yourself, so this is a self-reflection tool, not a validated questionnaire.

Attitude is not the same as output

A self-report tells you about your habits and your confidence, not about the quality of your ideas. Some people who rate themselves as highly creative produce ordinary ideas on a timed task, and some modest raters produce surprising ones.

The attitudes still matter. In 1987 Robert McCrae found that people high in openness to experience, one of the Big Five personality traits, also tended to do better on divergent thinking tasks. Willingness to try odd ideas, tolerate uncertainty and keep looking after the first answer makes original output more likely, even if it does not guarantee it.

How to read your scores

Look at the four parts separately, since one total hides the pattern. A high Openness score with a low Risk-Taking score is a common combination: you have ideas but keep them to yourself, often because of how others might react. In that case the useful step is small and practical, such as sharing one rough idea in a meeting or with a friend before it feels finished.

A low Flexibility score often shows up as sticking with the first solution. Try the brick exercise on a real problem: write ten possible approaches before you judge any of them. The judging comes after the list, not during it.

If you want to see how creativity fits into your wider personality, try the Openness to Experience test, or read about how your mindset affects learning and effort.