The key to being an explorer lies in what you do with your creative thinking and attitude, which allow you to consider different points of view. Like the explorer, you look for probabilities and possibilities. This is what is known as creative thinking skills: having the ability to create something new.

Because your mind recognizes patterns that cause you to think, “More of the same,” sometimes you need to challenge those mental blocks. You get locked into one approach, one method and strategy, without seeing other approaches. Creative thinking involves escaping from your obsolete ideas to new ones. Journalist Robert Wieder wrote, “Anyone can look for fashion in a boutique or history in a museum. The creative person looks for history in a hardware store and fashion in an airport.”

For you to strategically change probabilities into possibilities, you need to present the facts and figures to others as proof of merit.

I asked a client to consider different points of view for his job challenge, which was working to update and improve the process engineering documentation differently than what had been done in the past. From different points of view, he considered the following:

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