Leaders Expanding Their Minds through Elastic Thinking for Creative and Innovative Problem Solving
Dr. David E. Bartz

Abstract
Effective transformational leaders must be able to facilitate meaningful change to be successful. While the traditional approach of analytical thinking based on reasoning using existing facts and perspectives may have served them well in the past, this approach often limits leaders from causing meaningful change because it has a built-in bias of the here and now. Elastic thinking will serve leaders more effectively for identifying new creative and innovative ways to address existing problems and ongoing issues. Elastic thinking is represented by: (1) flexible thinking, (2) abandoning ingrained assumptions that limit the identification of new innovative and creative solutions to problems and issues, (3) utilizing a leader’s imagination and “free thinking” to establish new frameworks of references, and (4) looking beyond existing conditions by using different perspectives for thinking that opens up the mind to creating new associations and relationships between ideas and concepts for problem solving and addressing issues.

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