Thinking to a Higher Order
The following article written by Dr. Leon Alexander is a great article that depicts the cornerstone of success at the Paul kenneth Salon & SPA. The PK Team thrives to push beyond, both technically and financially to higher thinking. Aside from traingin with industry ICONS, such as, NAHA (North American Hairdressing Award) winner, Nicholas French, The PK Team trains at least 15-25 hrs per week on technical and business training. They are role playing continuously in order to better serve our guests.
Dr. Leon Alexander.......
Education is a companion that no misfortune can depress, no
crime can destroy and no enemy can alienate. It chastens vice,
it guides virtue, and at once lends grace and government to
genius. The beauty industry has excellent technical education for
hairdressers and good business education for salon owners.
If we aspire to elevate the beauty industry to compete with
serious retailers, marketers and service providers outside
the beauty industry, we need to emulate their proven best
practices. What is required is a radical approach to education that is approached from two levels. We need to offer business education to all service providers on sales, finance,
marketing and retailing. Equally, we need be looking at adding a lateral creativethinking element to salon owner’s education. Put simply,“Thinking to a Higher Order.”Thinking to a Higher Order
Higher-order thinking requires us to analyze information and
ideas in ways that transform their meaning and implications.
This transformation occurs when we combine facts and ideas
in order to synthesize, generalize, explain, hypothesize or
arrive at some conclusion or interpretation.
Manipulating information and ideas through these processes
allows us to solve problems and discover new meanings and
understandings. When we engage in the construction of
knowledge, an element of uncertainty is introduced into the
instructional process and makes instructional outcomes not
always predictable. Creative Thinking As a child, I remember being shocked to learn that WaltDisney was a person.
To me, Disney was a mysterious entity, symbolized by the
magical castle that appeared at the start of every film. A
cross between fairyland and a faceless corporation.
So it was hard to get my head around the idea that all those
films were the brainchild of one man. Not to mention the
theme parks. How could a single person be responsible for
all of that? Later on, I discovered that the truth was even stranger.
There wasn’t just one Walt Disney. There were three.
Creativity as a total process involves the coordination
of three sub processes: dreamer, realist and critic.
• The Dreamer – the visionary who dreamt up ideas for
business ventures.The Realist - the pragmatic producer who made things happen. • The Critic - the eagle-eyed evaluator who refined what the Dreamer and Realist produced A dreamer without a realist cannot turn ideas into tangible expressions. A critic and a dreamer without a realist just become stuck in a perpetual conflict. The dreamer and arealist might create things, but they might not achieve a high degree of quality without a critic. The critic helps to evaluate and refine the products of creativity. Creative thinking is also ‘double-minded’ thinking that‘operates on more than one plane’. It can be described as a‘transitory state’. As a result of this transitory state “thebalance of both emotion and thought is disturbed.”Using logic to derive new consequences amounts to little
more than permutations of existing concepts, we can generate
new links between concepts perhaps, but no conceptual
novelty. Here’s how thinking to a higher order works. If I hand you a brick and ask, “How many uses can you think of for this?”
you’ll probably come up with a dozen or so uses, all of them
functional, If, however, I asked you, “What 40 ways can you think of touse this?” I’m likely to get a whole different kind of list. After exhausting the obvious uses, you’ll find yourself
uncomfortably searching for other unthought-of uses.
Before, you’ll actually hit on something truly original. It is
here, at this uncomfortable point when you think you’ve
exhausted all practical uses for the brick, where true
creativity lives. It’s where you start to find new connections
between the object at hand and the world around you. You
start thinking beyond the obvious solutions. Your ego stops
judging every passing thought in the name of quantity.
Another example is to look at the symbol ‘x’ and ask what
universal word would define this symbol. Logic says it's a
letter x and this is correct. Now ask the question, what six
other explanations could it be? And you tap into higher
order lateral thinking mode. It could be times, multiply, wrong, kiss, cross, or ten in Roman numerals. We have now taken our brain out of logic mode into creativity mode. Creativity can be defined as the process through which the mind finds formerly unrecognized relationships between two entities or ideas. It is something that allows us to see something in a different way.
It is taking the obvious andmaking it interesting.Knowing
