I have just finished one degree and, apparently, my response is to consider starting another.
That was not an obvious trajectory for me. Formal education was never something I built much of my identity around when I was younger. Most of what I learned came through doing things: working, solving problems, getting things wrong, taking on more responsibility and trying to understand enough to make the next decision slightly better than the last one.
A few months ago I graduated with a degree in Management and Leadership. I started it in my forties, alongside work and family life, partly because I wanted to test some of the things I thought I already knew. It did that, sometimes reassuringly and sometimes less so.
Now I have been offered a place on a Master's programme at the Edward de Bono Institute for Creative Thinking and Innovation in Malta. The obvious question is probably why.
Not why Malta, although that has its own appeal. Not why another qualification either. I am becoming less interested in collecting those for their own sake.
The thing that interests me is the subject: thinking.
That sounds almost absurdly broad. We think all day, after all. We make decisions, solve problems, form opinions, argue with people, plan things and change our minds. Thinking is so ordinary that it is easy to treat it as something that simply happens rather than something worth examining.
Yet a lot of my working life has gradually convinced me otherwise. I have spent years around technology, data, organisations and change. These are fields that encourage a certain view of problems: something is not working, so we analyse it, gather information, design something better and implement it.
Sometimes that works. But plenty of problems survive perfectly good technology, perfectly good data and perfectly sensible plans. People disagree about what the problem actually is. Organisations optimise one part of a system while damaging another. Decisions are shaped by incentives nobody wants to talk about. A familiar solution gets applied because it worked before, even though the situation has changed. Everybody becomes busy delivering something without stopping to ask whether it remains the right thing to deliver.
Eventually you realise that the difficult part is often happening before the solution, in how the problem has been framed.
That is probably where my interest in thinking has come from. I am increasingly curious about the assumptions beneath decisions: why some possibilities appear obvious and others never appear at all; why intelligent people can look at the same evidence and see completely different things; why groups become attached to ideas long after the conditions that produced them have disappeared; and whether any of this can be improved deliberately.
Creative thinking can sound like something reserved for artists, designers or people who enjoy Post-it notes. That is not the version that interests me. I am interested in creativity as the ability to escape an established way of seeing something.
Sometimes that means producing a genuinely new idea. More often, perhaps, it means noticing that the question itself is wrong.
That feels increasingly important because we are entering a period in which producing answers is becoming remarkably cheap. I can already ask an AI system to summarise a document, challenge an argument, write code, generate options or identify patterns before I have finished my first coffee. The capability is extraordinary, but it creates a strange problem of its own.
If answers become abundant, deciding which questions matter may become more important. So might deciding which answers deserve attention.
A machine can generate twenty plausible strategies. Somebody still has to understand the organisation well enough to know whether any of them make sense. It can produce arguments on both sides of a decision, but somebody still has to decide what matters, what can be compromised and what cannot. More intelligence does not automatically produce more judgement, and more information has not made us collectively immune to confusion.
That makes me wonder whether some of the distinctly human capabilities we used to treat as slightly soft — judgement, curiosity, imagination, attention, reframing — might become much more valuable. Not because machines cannot think, or because there is some reassuring category of activity that humans will always own. I am increasingly suspicious of claims like that. Rather because tools change the nature of the work around them.
Calculators did not remove the need to understand mathematics. Spreadsheets did not remove the need to understand a business. Search engines did not make knowledge irrelevant. Perhaps increasingly capable AI will do something similar to thinking: remove a lot of the mechanical effort while exposing how much the quality of an outcome depended on what happened before the machine was asked to do anything.
What are we actually trying to achieve? Which constraints are real? Whose definition of success are we using? What have we assumed because everybody else assumes it? What would the problem look like from somewhere else?
Those questions feel less like philosophy to me now and more like practical tools.
There is another reason I am attracted to studying this formally. It is very easy to become interested in your own ideas. Reading widely, making notes and having conversations can make you feel as though you are developing a body of thought. Sometimes you are. Sometimes you are simply getting better at constructing explanations for things you already believed.
Structured study creates friction. Other people have read things you have not. Ideas have histories you were unaware of. Concepts that feel original turn out to have been debated for fifty years. Assumptions get challenged by evidence rather than enthusiasm.
I found some of that uncomfortable during my degree, which is probably why it was useful.
I do not want to spend the next few years simply accumulating arguments that confirm the direction I am already travelling in. I would rather find some ideas that cause trouble. Perhaps creative thinking is less teachable than I currently imagine. Perhaps some of the methods I find appealing work well in workshops but poorly inside real institutions. Perhaps experience, which I generally think of as an advantage, has quietly made some kinds of thinking harder for me.
I do not know. That uncertainty is part of the attraction.
There are some questions I find myself returning to. Can people actually become better thinkers, or merely more knowledgeable ones? How do you introduce genuinely different ideas into organisations that are designed, quite reasonably, to reduce uncertainty? What happens to expertise when machines can reproduce many of its visible outputs? How do we distinguish an unconventional idea from a bad one? How much of what we call judgement is really experience, and how much of experience is accumulated habit? And what should humans become better at when producing another answer is no longer particularly difficult?
I don't have answers to those questions yet.
That seems like quite a good reason to study them.