creative process

Implement

At this point, you have some great ideas. However, a lot of people have trouble motivating themselves to take the next step.

Creative ideas may mean big changes or taking risks. Some of us love change and risk. Others are scared by it.

Formulate an action plan with the simple steps you need to take in order to implement your ideas.

Start by identifying resources and actions that will allow you to implement your chosen solution.

Next, communicate your plan and make sure that everyone involved understands and accepts it.

Ideas that involve a lot work to implement can be particularly intimidating. Breaking their implementation down into a series of readily accomplished tasks makes these ideas easier to cope with and implement.

And now … take your action plan … and … DO IT!!!  If the situation veers away from your action plan steps, don’t worry. Rewrite the plan!

Like life, the implementation of plans (no matter how well laid out) is never linear … particularly now!

Here is an example of an idea that did not go as planned.

When bacteriologist Alexander Fleming returned from a holiday in 1928 to find mold growing on one of his Petri dishes, he probably thought his experiment was destined for the bin.

But when closer inspection revealed that the mold had inhibited the growth of bacteria around it, the most famous accidental discovery in history was born.

Penicillin was the first true antibiotic, heralding the start of a new age in medicine, but at first glance the circumstances surrounding its development were a complete failure!!

No matter what is going on around you, always implement your action plan!!!  JUST DO IT!!!

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Marilyn

If it’s time to ramp up your team’s innovation and collaboration abilities – we can help! Contact us today. 

For brainstorming tips, presentation and storytelling skills, or keynote speaking pointers be sure to follow Barefoot Brainstorming on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. OR see us in action on YouTube and Instagram!

We would love to hear from you! Leave us a comment down below or tag us on social media.

Develop

This is the stage of CPS, where you begin to focus on evaluating all of your possible options and developing/formulating solutions.

After you have written down all of your ideas, take a break. It might just be an hour. It might be a day or more. Then go through the ideas. Related ideas can be clustered and combined to form bigger ideas.

Analyze whether potential solutions meet your needs and criteria, and decide whether you can implement them successfully.

This is important. If you focus only on the “best” ideas or your favorite ideas, the chances are you will choose the less creative ones! Nevertheless, feel free to include your favorite ideas in the initial list of ideas.

Consider how well each idea meets your criteria, and give it a rating of 0 to 5 points, with five indicating a perfect match. If an idea falls short of a criterion, think about why this is so. Is there a way that it can be improved in order to increase its score? If so, make a note. Once you are finished, all of the ideas will have an evaluation score. Those ideas with the highest score best meet your criteria. They may not be your best ideas or your favorite ideas, but they are most likely to best solve your problem or enable you to achieve your goal.

Depending on the nature of the challenge and the winning ideas, you may be ready to jump right in and implement your ideas. In other cases, ideas may need to be developed further.

With complex ideas, a simple evaluation may not be enough. You may need to do a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis or discuss the idea with others who will be affected by it.

If the idea is business related, you may need to do a business case, market research, build a prototype or a combination of all of these.

 Also, keep in mind that you do not need to limit yourself to one winning idea. Often you can implement several ideas in order to solve your challenge.

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Marilyn

If it’s time to ramp up your team’s innovation and collaboration abilities – we can help! Contact us today. 

For brainstorming tips, presentation and storytelling skills, or keynote speaking pointers be sure to follow Barefoot Brainstorming on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. OR see us in action on YouTube and Instagram!

We would love to hear from you! Leave us a comment down below or tag us on social media.

Last week, I covered step 1 of the CPS process – Clarify.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/creative-problem-solving-step-1-marilyn-barefoot-1e/

Full disclosure … step 2 is my favourite – Ideate.

This step is where we generate ideas that answer the challenge questions you identified in step 1.

This is the stage where many people start, and which many assume is the only stage in creative problem solving.

This is where brainstorming and other methods may be used to find the beginnings of a solution. Note that at this stage, it is only the germ of the initial idea is identified.

If you try to jump to a complete solution in one go, you may find something that works, but you may also have left behind better and more creative solutions.

Idea seeds are often small, and it can be difficult to recognise their potential value. Thus this stage is only about looking for ‘likely-looking’ ideas.

It can also be tempting during this step to consider solutions that you’ve tried before, as our minds tend to return to habitual thinking patterns that stop us from producing new ideas. 

In order to ideate/produce truly new ideas successfully, you need a toolbox of creative exercises.

Here are a few of my most favourite.

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is a well-known method that people all over the world use to generate new ideas. What makes this tactic so popular?

In the course of brainstorming, there is no assessment of ideas. So, people can speak their ideas freely without fear of criticism.

Even bizarre/strange ideas are accepted openly. In fact, the crazier the idea, the better. Taming down is easier than thinking up.

It’s the fact that no one gets laughed at for proposing a ‘stupid’ idea. There is no right or wrong here – you just need to say the first thing that comes to your mind and that’s it.

Frequently, ideas are blended to create one good idea as indicated by the slogan “1+1=3.” Brainstorming is best done in groups of 5

Role Playing

Walking in someone else’s shoes is not easy, but sometimes it’s the only way to break the barrier and think of a brilliant idea. The process is simple: you just need to assume a completely different persona, and look at the challenge from their point of view. For example, how would a pirate solve this problem? Since the technique is fun, it can help people reduce their inhibitions and come out with unexpected ideas.

Think In Reverse

Instead of thinking about how to reach your goal, you can think about how not to achieve it. For example, you can make a plan on how to reduce the number of Instagram followers instead of increasing it. The so-called negative thinking often leads people to unbelievable new ideas.

SCAMPER

SCAMPER is an idea generation technique that utilizes action verbs as stimuli. It is a well-known kind of checklist developed by Bob Eberie that assists the person in coming up with ideas either for modifications that can be made on an existing product, or for making a new product. SCAMPER is an acronym with each letter standing for an action verb which in turn stands for a prompt for creative ideas.

• S – Substitute
• C – Combine
• A – Adapt
• M – Modify
• P – Put to another use
• E – Eliminate
• R – Reverse

Mind Mapping

Mind mapping is a graphical technique for imagining connections between various pieces of information or ideas. Each fact or idea is written down and then connected by curves or lines to its minor or major (previous or following) fact or idea, thus building a web of relationships.

It was Tony Buzan, a UK researcher, who developed the technique “mind mapping” discussed in his book ‘Use your Head’ (1972).

To get started with mind mapping, the participant just has to write a key phrase or word in the middle of the page. Then, they must write anything else that comes to mind on the very same page. After that, they try to make connections.

 Questioning assumptions

The majority of industries have an orthodoxy – unspoken but deeply-held beliefs that everyone stands by for getting things done. Sadly, they fail to realize that by questioning assumptions at every step of service or product development, they can actually enable the birth of fresh possibilities and ideas.

Here’s how to go about questioning assumptions: The participants should start by settling on the framework for the creative challenge. After this, they should produce 20 to 30 assumptions (irrespective of whether they are true or false). The next step is to select several assumptions from the many generated, and utilize them as idea triggers and thought starters to engender fresh ideas.

Brainwriting

 Instead of asking the participants to voice their ideas, they are told to pen down their ideas pertaining to a specific problem or question on sheets of paper.

After that, each participant can pass their ideas over to someone else. This someone else reads the ideas on the paper and adds some new ones.

Following another few minutes, the individual participants are again made to pass their papers to someone else and so the process continues. After about 15 minutes, you or someone else can collect the sheets from them and post them for instant discussion.

In order to succeed in building and sustaining a business, you need to be a relentless problem-identifier and problem-solver. 

In my opinion, it is the most critical skill or characteristic required in business … particularly right now!

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Marilyn

If it’s time to ramp up your team’s innovation and collaboration abilities – we can help! Contact us today. 

For brainstorming tips, presentation and storytelling skills, or keynote speaking pointers be sure to follow Barefoot Brainstorming on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. OR see us in action on YouTube and Instagram!

We would love to hear from you! Leave us a comment down below or tag us on social media.

Based on 60 years of study and practice in the field of creativity, we know that creative outcomes must be deliberate. We also know that the creative problem-solving (CPS) process is a universal set of four steps designed to frame a problem, find a novel solution, and formulate a plan of action. These CPS steps comprise the building blocks of innovation. First up: Clarify a problem, challenge, or opportunity.

1. Clarify and identify the problem

Identify the problem or goal and clearly define the parameters. The purpose of this is to completely understand what the issues are; it isn’t always exactly as it seems, and breaking it down can help challenge the original interpretation to best identify strategies moving forward.

Arguably the single most important step of CPS is identifying your real problem or goal. This may seem easy, but very often, what we believe to be the problem is not the real problem or goal.

EX: For instance, you may feel you need a new job. However, if you break down your problem and analyse what you are really looking for, it may transpire that the actual issue is that your income does not cover your costs of living. In this case, the solution may be a new job, but it might also be to re-arrange your expenses, or to seek a pay rise from your existing employer.

Five whys: A powerful problem-definition technique

The best way to clarify the problem and understand the underlying issues is to ask yourself – or better still, ask a friend or family member to ask you – a series of questions about your problem in order to clarify the true issues behind the problem.

• The first question to ask is simply: ‘why is this a problem?’ or ‘why do I wish to achieve this goal?’
• Once you have answered that, ask yourself ‘why else?’ four more times.
• Once you are clear on the real issues behind your problem, then you can turn these issues into creative challenges.

A creative challenge is basically a simple question framed to encourage suggestions or ideas … ‘In what ways might I [or we]…?’ or ‘How might I…?’ or ‘How could I…?’

Creative challenges should be simple, concise, and focus on a single issue.

For example: ‘How might I improve my Chinese language skills and find a job in Shanghai?’ are two completely separate challenges.

Trying to generate ideas that solve both challenges will be difficult and, as a result, will stifle idea generation.

So separate these into two challenges: ‘How might I improve my Chinese language skills?’ and ‘How might I find a job in Shanghai?’ Then attack each challenge individually. Once you have ideas for both, you may find a logical approach to solving both problems in a coordinated way. Or you might find that there is not a coordinated way and each problem must be tackled separately.

Creative challenges should not include evaluation criteria.

For example: ‘How might I find a more challenging job that is better paying and situated close to my home?’ If you put criteria in the challenge, you will limit your creative thinking. So simply ask: ‘How might I find a more challenging job?’ and after generating ideas, you can use the criteria to identify the ideas with the greatest potential.

Understanding the CPS process is important because creative thinking is one of the most useful skills you can possess.

Nearly every problem you face in work and in life can benefit from creative solutions, lateral thinking, and innovative ideas.

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Marilyn

If it’s time to ramp up your team’s innovation and collaboration abilities – we can help! Contact us today. 

For brainstorming tips, presentation and storytelling skills, or keynote speaking pointers be sure to follow Barefoot Brainstorming on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. OR see us in action on YouTube and Instagram!

We would love to hear from you! Leave us a comment down below or tag us on social media.