NOVEL POINT OF VIEW
The second question is: How is a novel point of view developed and constructed?
Gruber rightly stresses the importance to creativity of a novel point of view that stimulates new questions.
Throughout this handbook, there is stress on the fact that a novel perspective regarding conflict is to view it as a mutual problem the conflicting parties can work on together, cooperatively, in an attempt to discover mutually satisfactory solutions. As Chapter One emphasizes, reframing the conflict so that the conflicting parties see themselves as being in a collaborative rather than oppositional relation with regard to resolving their conflict is crucial to creative resolution. It not only produces an atmosphere conducive to creativity, but vastly expands the range of potential solutions as well.Although reframing makes a conflict more amenable to a solution, the ability to reformulate the reframed mutual problem so that, in turn, one can find a solution to it depends on the availability of cognitive resources. Ideas are important to creative resolution of conflict, and any factors that broaden the range of ideas and alternatives available to the participants in a conflict are useful. Intelligence, exposure to diverse experiences, interest in ideas, preference for the novel and complex, receptivity to metaphors and analogies, the capacity to make remote associations, independence of judgment, and the ability to play with ideas are some of the personal factors that characterize creative problem solvers. The availability of ideas also depends on such social conditions as the opportunity to communicate with and be exposed to other people who may have relevant and unfamiliar ideas (such as experts, impartial outsiders, people facing similar or analogous situations); a social atmosphere that values innovation and originality and encourages exchanging ideas; and a social tradition that fosters the optimistic view that, with effort and time, constructive solutions to problems that initially seem intractable can be discovered or invented.