Extension's future depends on creativity, as it has in the past. In the mid-80's, we must be creative educators when dealing with computers, growing international markets, the urbanization of sunbelt states, continuing rigorous fiscal accountability, environmental degradation from agriculture, jobless black urban youth, human nutrition's fiction and fact, declining agricultural school enrollments, etc. Only new solutions can ever hope to solve these 1985 problems. The following four approaches to creative thinking are recommended for busy Extension professionals. They require a little aspiration and almost no perspiration.
Nothing needs to be learned or practiced.
What's required is an awareness of what naturally stimulates creative thinking and activity, in ourselves and groups, and a desire to be creative. Preconscious Self Welcome your preconscious self, encouraging and enjoying it. Noted correspondent Bill Moyers learned from his study of creativity that you must pay attention to your preconscious self that slips messages to you, much as a note is slid under the door. In workshops in creative problem solving and decision making, Extension audiences readily describe novel ideas that unexpectedly come to them while driving, dreaming, relaxing, showering, listening to the Extension dean, or facing deadlines under pressure. It happens frequently to almost all of us on an involuntary basis.