Creative thinking is needed in various areas of process safety, for example:
- Identifying hazard scenarios in PHA
- Performing MOC reviews
- Identifying ways in which processes may be mis-operated
- Investigating the causes of incidents
- Planning for emergencies
Unfortunately, formal education usually discourages creative thinking and most people don’t need to be creative for much of what they do in daily life. Consequently, the ability to think creatively is not common. However, creative thinking is a skill that can be learnt. Guidance is available on ways in which creative thinking can be approached by anyone when the need arises.
Creative thinking taps into human imagination to generate new ideas. Imagination involves being able to see something in a new light and having the capacity to conceive of something new. People are born with imagination but it can languish and atrophy, often because it is not emphasized in education but rather is replaced with analysis. This situation certainly is true of the education that is received by engineers.
Creative thinking involves:
- Perceiving layers of detail
- Asking many kinds of thoughtful questions
- Identifying relationships and grouping and linking them
- Noticing links with prior knowledge and experience
- Developing interpretations based on observations
- Reflecting, assessing, and revising
Various practices have been found to be beneficial for creative thinking such as posing questions with some ambiguity, being alert for fringe thoughts, and allowing time for ideas to incubate. Also, various obstacles may need to be overcome to allow creative thinking to thrive, for example, searching for the “right” answer and assuming limitations that are not there. Guidelines for applying creative thinking to the challenges of process safety are provided in the article: