Generating options worth choosing between, and not killing them in the first ten seconds.
Creative thinking at work is mostly the ability to produce more than one real option, and to keep the fragile ones alive long enough to be developed. It is not a personality type. The practical obstacle is rarely a shortage of ideas — it's that generating and evaluating are different modes, and evaluation is faster, more socially rewarded, and usually correct about any given half-formed idea. Get them mixed and the room converges on whatever was safe to say. Innovation is what happens when a few of those options survive contact with a real constraint, which is also where most of the useful thinking actually occurs: constraints don't obstruct creative work so much as give it something to push against.
Meets every new suggestion with the precise reason it won't work, delivered within seconds and almost always correct — the licensing does prohibit it, the team has tried something similar, the numbers genuinely don't support it. Provides a real service and performs it at exactly the wrong moment, when the idea is still four words long. Has been right about nearly everything and gradually taught the room that half-formed thoughts are not safe to say out loud.
Requires that solutions be interesting, and is visibly disappointed when a problem turns out to have a boring answer that already exists. Re-solves settled questions in more inventive ways, generally at greater cost and with new failure modes nobody has met before. Mistakes novelty for the objective rather than an occasional side effect of solving something, and produces work that is consistently original and intermittently useful, and which the next person to maintain it will describe in rather different terms.
Explains that real creative work would be possible here given more time, more budget, more autonomy and a different approvals process, all of which is true and none of which is arriving. Treats the actual constraints as disqualifying rather than as the shape of the problem, and so produces nothing within them, while remaining genuinely and articulately convinced that the capability is present and the conditions are not. Has been in three organizations with three different sets of constraints, each of which turned out to be the wrong ones.
Imports whole solutions from unrelated domains on the strength of a pleasing surface resemblance. "We should do for procurement what Spotify did for music." The sentence lands well in the room and nobody, including the speaker, has checked whether the mechanics transfer — the economics, the distribution, the regulator, or the fact that the comparison rests entirely on both things involving a catalogue. The analogy survives precisely as long as nobody asks a second question about it.
Someone floats a rough idea in a meeting and you can immediately see three reasons it fails. What would you do — say them now while they're fresh, or ask a question that develops the idea and hold the objections until there's something solid to test them against?
Your team keeps producing variations on the same approach. What would you do — push for more ideas, or change the constraint on purpose ("what if we had a tenth of the budget?") to force a different shape?
A proposal is exciting, genuinely novel, and solves a problem that an existing boring tool already handles. What would you do — back it for the ambition, or use the boring tool and spend the ambition somewhere it's needed?