Productive thinking is the ability to understand the relationships within a problem and discover new ways of approaching it rather than relying solely on established solutions. It encourages exploration, curiosity, and insight-driven decision-making. This mindset is particularly valuable in design, innovation, and strategy because modern business challenges are often complex and unpredictable. Productive thinkers seek to understand the true nature of problems before attempting to solve them. By questioning assumptions and exploring different perspectives, they uncover opportunities that may otherwise remain hidden.
What if I told you that you don't know how to think?
Max believes that productive thinking is the key to better understanding clients and customers’ needs.
As UXers we’re often guilty of using a problem-solving approach that revolves around prior experience, learned bias, logic and association.
This approach is known as reproductive thinking, as defined by Max Wertheimer, one of the founders of Gestalt psychology.
Most designers will be familiar with gestalt principles (if you aren’t, go read about them after you finish this article.)
They form the basis of the way our brains process shape and form and how we connect the dots without really thinking about it. It’s a subject that’s been written about extensively, so I’m not going to cover it here.
What I’m here to tell you is that we need to learn how to think and more specifically, how to think productively.
The problem with reproductive thinking
To start understanding why this reproductive thinking is problematic for designers, let’s examine what reproductive thinking looks like:
You might say that if a person can solve a mathematical equation, they must be good at thinking or problem solving, but the reality would be that they are following a logic that has been learned in an academic setting.
They are thinking but following a predefined process rather than using an explorative approach.
Another example, that I think is particularly relevant to our industry, is that just because someone has been at a company or in a field for a long time, they might be considered experienced or an ‘expert’.
However, it may also make them prone to institutionalised ways of thinking that inhibit productive problem solving.
Often this is compounded in companies that only do things in specific ways with little scope for anything else.
It’s not to say that experience or the ability to follow logic is irrelevant – of course these things have importance and we value them greatly in our field but to say they make a person good at productive thinking would be wrong. It makes them good at reproductive thinking.
To quote Max Wertheimer himself: “The role of past experience is of high importance, but what matters is what one has gained from experience — blind, understood connections, or insight into structural inner relatedness. What matters is how and what one recalls, how he applies what’s recalled, whether blindly, in a piece meal way, or in accordance with the situation.”
Check yourself and your approach
To say what we’ve seen before means it also holds true in another context is vain and dangerous for us as UX practitioners.
In essence, valuing process and management over creativity and autonomy sets a dangerous precedent. True problem solving only comes from the insight gained through open, honest inquiry.
There is a reason disruptive companies are often founded by those that are young and inexperienced in a corporate environment, they are not bound by the ingrained bias brought about by a career path.
Most of the time, they identify an unmet need from an audience that is not well understood by a big multinational entity and exploit it with insight that can only be gained from discussion, observation and active participation with that audience.
This also plays into why clients hire agencies – they sit outside global organisations and offer different perspectives on seemingly deadlocked or dead cert issues.
This is because the patterns and experiences which inform their ideas aren’t conditioned by an intimate, institutionalised knowledge of the client’s company.
What is productive thinking?
The basis of productive thinking is understanding what the relevant relationships in a problem space are.
Only with open and honest inquiry can we gain the insight we need to take to transition from a state that is meaningless to one that is meaningful.
To do this effectively, most problems need to be reorganised.
To demonstrate insightful reorganisation - grab a piece of paper and draw nine dots in three columns of three to create a square shape.
Then, without taking your pen off the paper, attempt to draw four straight lines that touch all nine dots.
In this example, our minds default to gestalt principles of closure and proximity and interpret that a. the dots are a group, and b. imply they form a square, thus giving us the impression that the working space is constrained to the square – even though the task expresses no limitation of the sort, it’s purely a constraint devised by the mind and is not a part of the problem.
The perception of a square is irrelevant. There is only one relevant relationship in the puzzle, that of the nine dots to the four lines.
For an experience designer or strategist, the most important thing is to be able to define what the relevant relationships in a problem space are and that means looking beyond the immediate to challenge assumptions that we might have about a problem space.
The problem that many of us face is usually one of two things:
Hubris, a pre-occupation of needing to show how good we are at thinking and solving problems on our own, which stops us from asking questions. i.e. “I’m not going to put my hand up and ask if I can draw outside the dots, I’m just going to look at every permutation within the dots”
Process, being shut down from asking questions because it doesn’t fit the formula for how things work. i.e. I use grids for designing, so this is familiar to me, I’ll just do everything in a grid and it’ll work somehow
This is exactly what clients do, they ask you to solve a problem but don’t necessarily understand what information is relevant to you, it’s our responsibility to get the right information by asking the right questions.
To put it plainly, we need to spend less time looking for answers and more time looking for the right questions. i.e. What if I draw outside of the grid?
By applying productive thinking you can reorganise the problem space, and point towards a simple, new solution. That’s the crux of productive thinking.
I talked about understanding problems in my previous article, the core of which was how do we find what the relevant component parts of a problem space are?
How do we define and understand them, and a what approach can take to gain the insight we need to start thinking productively and coming up with feasible solutions?
This inquiry is aided by productive thinking as I’ve outlined here.
Related articles
Design Thinking - FAQs
Reproductive thinking relies on previous experiences, known frameworks, and familiar patterns to solve problems. While this approach is efficient in predictable situations, it can limit creativity when organizations face new challenges requiring fresh perspectives. Experienced professionals may unconsciously apply old solutions to problems that require entirely different approaches. This can create blind spots and prevent organizations from recognizing new opportunities. When teams rely too heavily on past successes, they may fail to adapt to changing customer needs and market conditions.
Assumptions often act as invisible constraints that shape how people define and solve problems. Many organizations become trapped by beliefs about what customers want, how processes should work, or what solutions are possible. These assumptions can limit creativity and prevent meaningful innovation. By questioning assumptions, teams can redefine problem spaces and discover alternative approaches. This process often reveals opportunities that were previously overlooked. Innovation frequently occurs when individuals challenge conventional wisdom and consider possibilities beyond what appears obvious or familiar.
Productive thinking encourages businesses to prioritize inquiry over assumptions. Instead of believing they already understand customers, organizations actively seek insights through observation, interviews, research, and engagement. This approach creates a richer understanding of customer motivations and behaviors. By focusing on learning, businesses can identify unmet needs and design solutions that address real-world challenges. This customer-centered perspective often leads to more innovative products, stronger user experiences, and greater market relevance. Understanding customers deeply is one of the most valuable outcomes of productive thinking.
Experience and expertise provide valuable knowledge, but they can also create cognitive biases. Professionals who spend many years within a particular organization or industry may become conditioned by established processes and assumptions. This conditioning can make it difficult to recognize alternative perspectives or challenge existing practices. Organizations benefit when experienced professionals combine their knowledge with curiosity and openness to new ideas. A balance between expertise and exploration helps businesses remain innovative and responsive to change.
Complex challenges rarely have straightforward solutions. Productive thinking enables teams to step back, reassess assumptions, and understand the relationships driving a problem before rushing into implementation. This leads to better questions, deeper insights, and more effective solutions. Organizations that cultivate productive thinking develop stronger problem-solving capabilities and become more adaptable. By encouraging exploration, collaboration, and inquiry, businesses can navigate uncertainty more effectively and create innovative solutions that generate meaningful value for customers and stakeholders.