creative thinking

A scientist in 3M’s commercial office took advantage of what this particular company calls creative time where people can still get paid doing nothing except to think creatively, knowing that a spark of an idea can turn out millions of profits. Art Fry is the name of the scientist and he was singing for a church choir during his spare time. He noticed that every time he marked his hymnal with little pieces of paper they would fall out on the floor. One day an inspiration came. He remembered an adhesive, a glue developed in a laboratory, which was considered a failure because it did not stick very well. He got it and coated a paper sample with the adhesive and he discovered that it was not only a good bookmark, but it was also good for writing notes because it will stay in place as long as you want and you can take it off without sticking to or damaging the page. Then it can be re-stuck to another page, over and over again. He hit the jackpot – the resulting product was called Post It notes and since then became a very successful product of 3M’s company. What was once considered a failure by many became a success because one person’s creative thinking recognized a new opportunity.


Creative thinking leads to innovations and good innovations lead to new ways of presenting and doing things. John the XXIII for example was elected to the papacy as an interim pope. The Cardinals thought that since he is old and frail and ready to die, he could assume the role as a caretaker pope while they make up their minds as to who really would be best fitted for the job. But it was John XXIII who had the last laugh – for it was he who made so much impact in church life since the council of Trent. He convoked Vatican II. Pope Leo the great was another and so is Pope Gregory the great. People affixed to their names the word great precisely because of the impact they made to the church and to the people of their time. This tradition of greatness as a surname tells us so much of our St. and Patron – St. Albert the Great. What made St. Albert great besides being a great philosopher and teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas? People affixed Great to his surname because of the impact he made in the academe of his time. He got hold of Avicenna’s translation of Aristotle’s work, read it, worked through it, rethought it and did something about it. To make the long story short that rethinking paved the way for scholasticism, it identified philosophy as a distinct science from but a handmaid of theology and was convinced that there is a distinction between faith and science. Without these principles established by St. Albert the Great we would still be believing today that the sun rotates around the earth as biblical truth and still hold Galileo under excommunication for holding an opposite view. Or the church would still insists today on believing that God actually created the world in just six days 4500 years before Christ and risk becoming the laughing stock of science which just discovered the bones of a brontosaurus which lived on earth 2 million years ago. Without the principles of St. Albert the church would still be outdated in its approach to natural science and would still probably believe that a fever is caused by an evil spirit needing exorcism, instead of being caused by a flu virus needing paracetamol. All these did happen because of a thinker who thought creatively and innovated on available data. His name, St. Albert the Great. Today we need people with the same stuff.
People who could not rethink things, people who could not think creatively and worst people who could not think for themselves at all but merely follow orders as given and dictated verbatim, should have no place in this community. Your freedom is not a license to do whatever you want. The loose structure is not a permission to do whatever I feel like doing, rather it creates for you an environment to live creatively – to think through rather than spoon-fed, to act on your own rather than dictated upon, to run your life and make significant decisions rather than being leashed like a dog, to be accountable for the choices you make rather than living a life of an infant freed from any responsibility.
You can always sense this when you observe how people work and I can observe this very keenly now as you do your jobs. It might be in the way you arrange a table, in the way you set things up, in the decisions you make. There are people so industrious but they do not use their head which runs like a train with only one set of track. There are people so obedient they would not do anything if you would not ask them. There are also the classic people – they do things solely because it was done in the past and the manner they do it is exactly the same. But worst of all there are people who do nothing at all, unaffected in anyway you would conclude Erap is a topnotch in class compared to this guy.
We need priests who can think, priests who do not only know how to manage but know how to lead, to take risks in thinking creatively, and I am glad I have worked with some of them here. Let me end with the difference between a manager and a leader which we are looking nowadays in a priest – a priest after the greats of former times - after St. Albert the Great. It says:
The manager administers – the leader innovates.
The manager maintains – the leader develops.
The manager relies on systems – the leader relies on people
The manager counts on controls – the leader counts on trust.
The manager does things right – the leader does the right thing.