Here’s a minor, but valuable tip:
If you’re asked to do something that seems a little… funny, keep asking why until you get a logical, reasonable or at least honest answer.
Also, if someone comes up to you, screaming that their problem is the worst ever and they need immediate help, keep asking why it’s a problem until you find out what’s really wrong.
Problem diagnosis and opportunity diagnosis: they are your friends.
“Doctor, I have a problem. It hurts when I do this.”
“Well, then the answer is simple. Don’t do that.”
I’m serious! How much do you live for the thrill of a new discovery. Finding out what made someone comment on your blog. Seeing that Google Alert pop up to say someone new linked to your site. Getting through that final writer’s block and slamming headlong into a flurry of frenetic creative fury?
What do you do when you just can’t turn the corner? When the thing you just found – the new shiny approach to writing, or that comment that sparks an idea for a new blog post – doesn’t shape up to its potential? Or maybe it’s worse than that, and the shiny thing turned out to be a lurking menace. It could turn into a blog post your audience didn’t relate to, a business decision that was for some reason incompatible with your model, or something even more sinister – dead silence and no response.
What to do? Well, we can continue adjusting our stance, and focus on what has worked, rather than what has not – or we can try to figure out why what didn’t work, didn’t work.
It’s easy to see, most of the time, why success looks like it does. You get recognition, praise, sales – whatever you’re looking for – often as a direct result of the work you’ve done. What’s harder to discern, of course, is what happens when there’s silence. Was it lurkers? Was it Anonymous? How can you tell – and how can you avoid the problems next time?
First: Do some diagnosis.
Ok, so it’s not just Doctors using this one – diagnosis is a statistical and analytical term as much as a medical one, and it’s about more than just finding out what’s wrong. Health (or in our case success) isn’t just about an absence of symptom – it’s about optimum function.
Thus;
Are you getting a sense of what might have caused the failure – or lack of response – to your efforts? Do you have some ideas as to what might have gone wrong?
Excellent.
Second: Exercise your skill at prognosis.
Any statistician will tell you that accurate prognosis is only possible at scale. With a large enough sample, any statistic can be proven in any direction – but that’s not helpful when we need laser-targeted, actionable plans. Prognosis is hard, especially for human elements such as sickness or creativity, because you have to come at everything from multiple directions at once:
That being said, building a profile of your successes, as well as your less successful actions and projects, will help you both diagnose problems as they arise (their nature, their effect, and their cause in that order of importance), and create prognosis scenarios in an effort to recover, move on, and create even more success – and participate in the building of your own confidence – in the future.
After all, it may really be simple, with some examination.
Sometimes, we hear the word No as a rejection, as an indication of failure. Sometimes, it’s just Not Now, or Not Yet, or No Unless.
Remember, always, to keep it simple – the best diagnosis and prognosis usually are.
And remember Steven King’s Corollary to Success:
A person’s chance of succeeding in life is directly related to the density, and the diversity, of times they can be told No without slowing down, stopping, or changing course.
Image by Portland Prevention.
As I’m plowing through the third week of NaNoWriMo, I’ve been surprised at how difficult it has been to pull scenes, characters and settings out of my imagination. It’s a bit rusty, and the struggle to apply some creative WD-40 to those mental cogs got me thinking.
img courtesy bizior on sxc
We focus a lot here on the cognitive and physical blocks to clear thinking and creativity. Sometimes, though, the blocks are fears tied to painful memory or our tendency to imagine a distinctly unpleasant future.
Ironically, sometimes it’s those of us with the most vivid natural imagination that sometimes find it difficult to access that imagination, due to some traumatic or difficult experience in the past. Additionally, those of us with overactive imaginations sometimes tend to find that we often scare ourselves by mentally projecting worst case scenarios based on realistically harmless situations.
If you’re the grown-up equivalent of Ralphie Philips, you may find yourself replaying your most difficult and painful moments over and over in your head. Or you may find yourself instantly imagining a fiery crash and a mournful funeral every time your spouse checks a text message while driving.
To avoid that unpleasant situation, some of us shut down our own imaginative capacity substantially, making it difficult to think creatively when it’s required or desirable.
There’s actually a psychological reason for that. Replaying is one way your psyche builds up emotional resistance to those memories. It’s sort of like exposing yourself to small children to build up your immune system.
However, that explanation is no fun when your imagination has been effectively hijacked by your worst experiences and fears.
One approach, if it’s primarily past memories that are causing the block, is therapy or other emotional healing. Bringing about a creative renaissance by regaining access to the naturally curious, imaginative child-like parts of your mind is one of the goals of the work of John Bradshaw as well as the well-known 12 steps program.
Another approach is to embrace the fear, and build up a resistance to it. This is often more helpful if you tend to imagine catastrophe around every corner.
Some of the greatest artists and writers in history managed to work around this particular mental block by embracing the dark side of their imagination. Stephen King alone has become an icon in pop culture by embracing his tendency to let his imagination automatically go to the worst case scenario, regardless of how impossible or horrifying that worst case scenario might be.
Do you struggle with an imagination that’s sometimes a little too powerful? What tricks have you learned to harness it?
Yesterday we started looking at a very practical use for creative problem solving: buying a gift for the person who has everything. We are applying the creative problem solving (CPS) technique to find the perfect gift for your rich uncle (if you don’t have a rich uncle, just pretend and follow along, OK?)
We know what our problem is, so we finished CPS step 1 quite easily.
In step 2, we went through what we know about your rich uncle and what you’re able to spend on his gift. Still looks pretty challenging. Time for step 3:
Sometimes you need to take your problem question and turn it into something that’s more useful. You need to take into account your limitations and, where possible, make your question more specific and meaningful.
You think about this for awhile and go through a number of ideas. After a lot of thought and consideration, you reframe your problem as follows:
What kind of gift can I get my uncle that would be meaningful to him and also be something I can afford on my budget?
This is more specific that the previous problem statement. It allows you to eliminate a bunch of possibilities that just won’t fit within your decision criteria.
Idea generation is the heart of brainstorming. So naturally that’s what you do now. You try to come up with as many ideas as you can for solving the reframed problem.
The ideas that you come up are all over the place. You contemplate buying your uncle a ticket on the first Virgin Galactic flight, as an example. It goes on the list, no matter how crazy it seems. Later on the idea might get removed (well, OK, it’s a goner) but for now it stays.
As you go through the ideas, you feel that it might make sense to do something charitable in your uncle’s name. After all, he is the man who has everything, so he might find helping someone else to be more meaningful. You put that down, too, even though you know he doesn’t approve of handouts.
When you come up with all of the ideas that you can think of (and some of them are pretty weird), you move on to the next step…
Some of your ideas are really interesting. You think you’re on to something with the charitable donation idea. But how to get past the problem of handouts? Your uncle never approved of charity, of just signing a check and handing it off.
You start thinking about his career again. He used to travel the world a lot. His banking work wasn’t just in the Western world. He spent a lot of time in various Third World countries as well. In fact, that’s where his opinions about charity were cemented, mainly because of some of the waste and abuse of charity money he’d seen.
You also recall that your uncle was a big proponent of small business loans.
You think about it some more… and then a really good idea hits you. You remember hearing about microloans, which are relatively small loans given to entrepreneurs, often in Third World countries, who just need a small amount of capital to start something. You remember your uncle mentioning how he once gave a personal loan to some needy people who needed to buy farm equipment. He took pride in helping them.
The thing that appeals to you is that microloans not only seem to be useful, they might be something that you can afford! This pleases you to no end.
You decide to go ahead with the microloan gift on behalf of your uncle. You’ve only got a few weeks before Christmas, so you need to get going. You decide to:
You come up with dates for each task and then you get to work!
Several weeks later, the look of pride on your uncle’s face is the best gift of all.
This was just a simple example of how to use creative problem solving to solving a challenging problem. Hopefully this is a good demonstration and it will give you some good ideas of your own to work on!
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There’s a major problem out there that affects us all, and we don’t like to talk about it. Let’s face it: we’ve all been plagued with this particular problem at least once in our lives. And it’s stumped you and me both.
It’s likely caused premature loss of hair, formation of ulcers, and severe mental anguish. It usually makes you curse the approach of the end of the calendar year.
It’s time to acknowledge this problem, bring it out into the open. Brace yourself: it might hurt a bit. It’s time to face the truth.
There are few problems that are harder to solve than buying the perfect Christmas gift.
How do you buy a gift for the person who has everything – the relative, colleague or friend who’s impossible to shop for?
This isn’t an article about power shopping, deal digging, or insights into the best and least known products and services. Sorry, wrong blog.
What this is, however, is something much more powerful. We’re going to use this scenario as a way to give you a great gift: the ability to solve difficult problems. And we’re going to start with a really tough one… just in time for Christmas.
We’re going to talk about using creative problem solving (aka CPS) as a way to find that perfect Christmas gift.
Is picking the perfect gift a trivial and unworthy use of a problem solving methodology like CPS?
My argument: if you can’t use these techniques for real life problems… what good are they?
CPS has been around for decades. It was created by a couple of smart guys named Alex and Sidney:
CPS is a way to solve problems using a variation of Osbourne’s classic brainstorming technique, where you generate lots of ideas – good or bad – and then you critically evaluate them to find the best ones. All of this might seem like dry academic stuff, but it’s not! It’s actually interesting and fun. Yes, it takes some work and some hard thinking. On the other hand… if you’re trying to solve an impossible problem… what have you got to lose?
We’re going to share a simple and easy to use version of CPS that’s featured in Jack’s Notebook, a great business novel by creativity expert Gregg Fraley. He summarized CPS in six easy steps (we’ve covered the CPS technique in a previous article):
The first step in CPS in to identify the challenge. This step takes a bit of time if you only have a vague idea of what your problem is. You list a bunch of questions or ideas that are more specific mini-problems in order to find something concrete to tackle.
In our example, you don’t have to spend a lot of time on this. You already know that you want to find the perfect gift for someone. In this case, your “someone” is your rich uncle Thomas, the man who has everything. It that’s not a challenge, I don’t know what is.
At this stage of problem solving, you list all of the things that you know (or believe you know) about your problem. This exercise is the facts and feelings exploration. By reviewing that information, you’ll have a better idea of what to do next.
One reason why people get stuck when they’re trying to buy a gift for someone is that they don’t leave enough time to do a good job of shopping. The other reason, unfortunately, is that they don’t stop to really think and plan. At this step, we’re going to do that thinking and planning.
After thinking for 30 minutes or so, you come up with the following facts and feelings about Uncle Thomas:
You also take stock of yourself:
Now you feel kind of depressed. The information that you have so far does allow you to eliminate a lot of possible gift ideas. Unfortunately, it looks like it’s going to eliminate every possible gift idea that you can think of.
Maybe your question is too broadly stated. Maybe you’re going to have to find a way to narrow your focus and find something more concrete to think about.
Thank goodness the next CPS step is all about reframing the question!
Don’t worry, we’re going to finish off this post tomorrow. After all, you still need that perfect gift! EDIT: you can now find the second part of this post here.
Image by Sarah G
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Video Fridays is back once again! We’re linking to a video about a writer who talks about creativity.
Amy Tan is a successful author who gave a wonderful TED talk about creativity. She is the author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife and The Hundred Secret Senses, among other books.
If you’re not familiar with TED, it’s a great source of ideas about being creative, thinking differently and doing great work. TED’s motto is ideas worth spreading and there’s lots of great material there.
Here it is – enjoy!
Note: if you don’t see the embedded video below, you can find the link to her talk right here.
Here’s a great story that shows why asking the right question is just as important as getting the right answer. One of the running gags in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy story has to do with the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. (Spoiler: it’s 42.)
A race of highly advanced alien beings wanted to know the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, so they built a gigantic computer which spent millions of years figuring out the Answer. When the ancestors of the original builders found out the Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything was 42, they were simultaneously ecstatic, despondent, and confused:
It turned out that knowing the correct Question was just as important as knowing the Answer. Questions provide crucial context for any knowledge that you learn.
A number of years ago I participated in a two day seminar led by a couple of business professors. I chatted with one of them briefly and during our conversation, he said the following: “The quality of a CEO can be measured by the quality of the questions that they ask.” This idea isn’t limited to the world of business: it’s universal. You have to ask the right questions to be able to learn or do great things.
First of all, there are 6 fundamental questions that can be asked about anything:
Sometimes Why is the most important question to ask. There’s a problem solving technique that’s referred to as the 5 Whys method. It’s used to find the true cause (or root cause) of a problem. When someone thinks they are explaining a problem to you, they are usually describing a symptom of the problem. They are not telling what caused the problem, they are telling you about the effect the problem is having on them. So the question you need to get answered is Why? Why is this problem happening?
But here’s the problem (with the problem): you don’t always get to the cause of the problem on the first try. Sometimes the person who’s experiencing the problem (or the effect) doesn’t have the knowledge to understand why the problem is occurring. Or else they give you information that isn’t helpful.
And so you go on an investigation, trying to find out who knows what information. The rule of thumb is that you should be able to find the cause of virtually any problem by asking the question Why five times, building on each answer until you find out the real cause of the problem.
So that’s a simple way to ask the best questions: ask the same question repeatedly until you get the right answer.
But this is just one possible way to find the best questions to ask. There are plenty of others out there. I’ll bet you know some really good ways to ask good questions. I think we’d all benefit from your knowledge and experience.
So, in the comments section, tell us how you come up with the best questions to ask.
P.S. Here’s a great post from Dumb Little Man on the importance of good questions.
Images by Patrick Hoesly, Mrs Logic, walknboston
TweetReversals are a great creative challenge. They can also help you solve problems. Taking a key piece of information and reversing it early in a process (or a story) can yield unexpected insights and powerful results.
Sometimes turning the villain into the hero is the key to solving a problem.
Let’s take a famous pop culture example and unpack it a bit.
No, I don’t mean Toy Story.
I mean something… bigger. From a long, long time ago in a galaxy far far away.
Star Wars started out pretty straightforward when it debuted in 1977. Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Han Solo and the Rebel Alliance were the good guys. The evil Darth Vader, dressed in hard, shiny black was the bad guy. He killed people for no good reason. He tortured. He was menacing. He had an appropriately chilling voice. He probably made a few kids wet their beds in the day.
Later on, it turned out Darth Vader was just a lieutenant. The REAL bad guy was Emperor Palpatine, the evil Sith Lord who destroyed the Republic from within as a Senator, then as Chancellor. He ruled the resulting Galactic Empire with an iron fist (and Force lightning). Palpatine spent decades manipulating events just to crush all resistance and put himself in power. He was very good at that. It was only the defection of Darth Vader that led to the Emperor’s defeat.
Emperor Palpatine was the personification of evil. His face and body were yellowed and withered from an ancient battle. He craved power and control. He wanted to rule the galaxy and he did. There are few characters as one-dimensional as the Emperor, based on what we’re shown in the Star Wars movies.
And yet… there’s something fascinating about Palpatine, especially if you watch the Star Wars prequels: The Phantom Menace, Attack of The Clones and Revenge of the Sith, as well as the Clone Wars movie and animated series. Although he operated in the shadows as Darth Sidious, a Sith Lord, he seemed to be a harmless politician with a preference for privacy. He appeared to be a peaceful and quietly popular fellow who maneuvered his way into power with a soft touch. Palpatine even liked the opera, a touch that actor Ian McDiarmid used to try to make the obvious villain a bit more palatable.
I’ve become fascinated by Palpatine because he’s a cypher. All you know about him is his desire for power and his ruthless methods. Yet, when you watch how he’s portrayed in the Star Wars prequels, he comes across as subtle and sophisticated. Sure, it’s all an act and that’s intensified because we know how the Star Wars saga ends.
But he doesn’t seem like a blood-thirsty conqueror. The lust for power and control seems so… unsophisticated. Especially towards the end of the movies when he was firmly established as the merciless Emperor. Is that what he really wanted? Power for the sake of power? Was he really just, say, the inspiration for Harry Potter’s Lord Voldemort, one of the closest modern equivalents?
Yes, that does seem to be his motivation. We judge him by his actions, because there’s nothing else to see.
But what if there was another layer or dimension to Palpatine’s plans that we never saw?
What if he was convinced that he was filling it out a role in a prophecy, one that forced him to do evil things in order to serve some greater good? He made allusions to the fact that he could see the future in the movies… maybe he was convinced that he was serving the greatest good?
Maybe the Republic was sufficiently corrupt that it needed to be destroyed and remade? Perhaps the problem was with the Jedi Order?
Maybe he had to intercede in Anakin Skywalker’s life in order to prevent some other greater tragedy from happening?
Maybe the whole purpose was really to ensure that Anakin’s children Luke and Leia grew up a certain way?
This is all speculation, of course. But it’s interesting to flip around the plotline of the Star Wars movies and tell them from the Emperor’s perspective, isn’t it? Instead of an action story, Star Wars would become a political thriller. Palpatine would still be mysterious and part of the fun would be trying to figure out what Palpatine was really up to. It would be a more adult movie and it might have gotten more critical acclaim.
And George Lucas could have been a whole lot poorer – thrillers don’t usually spark toy sales.
If you’re stuck, either in a story, a blog post or in a business situation, look at the reverse or opposite of your problem situation and see if it provides any insight.
Find a problem situation and reverse the role of the bad guy. Will things work better if they are the hero?
And if you know of any good Star Wars fiction where the Emperor really is the good guy, let me know, please? Thanks.
Images by kennymatic, and Wikipedia
Mind maps are not just for brain dumps: mind maps can help you solve problems.
We’ve previously described mind mapping here at Thoughtwrestling; hopefully that was a good starting point and gave you some valuable insights. We’ve also given you an overview of problem solving techniques. Now we’re going to try to put the two concepts together.
We’ve come across three different methods to help you use mind maps to solve problems. They are:
Use the problem as the center of the mind map. Then use the five W’s technique with your mind map, one W for each branch of the mind map. The five Ws are:
By looking at each W on the mind map and extrapolating each one to lower levels of detail, possible solutions begin to emerge. The answers begin to emerge with the details of a problem.
Unpacking Who for a moment: take some time and figure out who is directly involved in a problem. Then think about who might be indirectly involved with the problem and put those names in branches in the mind map, too. Finally, think about who could help you solve the problem and put them on the mindmap as well.
It’s a great visual/thinking tool that allows you to identify the components of your problem in a clear, visual manner.
The folks at Illumine Training have described this rather succinctly:
One of the main challenges for anyone wishing to be creative is in provoking their thinking away from existing paradigms. There are a number of ways of doing this, such as thinking of similarities to or differences from some of the more or less random words. The choice of words is arbitrary since the key here is to provoking thinking. Typical words (branches) may be: Animals, Transport, People, Textures, Shapes etc.
For example, you might try some seemingly strange ideas, like:
Forced relationships and analogies don’t always make sense, but they can lead you towards other, viable solutions. Sometimes you need to look for the thing that’s different.
Look for hidden or surprising connections between things, like your mind does unconsciously when you brainstorm. The best time for you to do this is when you’ve got a basic mind map for your problem already.
In the previous method you can see what happens when you force unnatural connections between things. This time, you’re looking for relationships or commonalities that are not immediately obvious. You’re filling in knowledge gaps and building a better understanding of your problem situation.
For example, as you build a mind map you might find that someone on your team has a valuable skill or experience that could be useful on a task that you’re doing.
Or, you might discover that a software application has untapped capabilities that you could use to solve your problem.
Or maybe you’ll see that your company’s delivery trucks aren’t being used at a time when you can make use of them to perform critical deliveries to help you resolve a customer service problem.
Try these uses of mind maps as problem solving tools; they can help you. Also, if you have any ideas, questions or suggestions about how to use mindmapping to solve problems, please share them in the comments section below!
Also, a small request: please bookmark this post on Delicious and reTweet it if you find it to be useful – thanks so much!
Other resources:
To find out more about our Unstuck Focused Organized Using Mind Mapping product, including how to buy it, click here.
A Beginner’s Guide to Making a Mind Map
Problem Solving with Tony Buzan’s Mind Maps
Mind Mapping Software: a prism for problem solving
Canada is both problem and solution. It’s an ongoing exercise in creativity and problem solving. Sometimes it works out well; sometimes not.
And it’s really, really big!
Its lessons are big too. When it comes to solving problems and being creative, it provides the biggest lesson of all: just when you think you know something, you don’t.
You have to think differently. You have to learn more. You have to toss your way of seeing aside and see in new ways – often, the ways of others.
We are tourists
In any country but our own we are tourists. This has nothing to do with citizenship papers or other formal aspects of citizenry. It is simply that the only country we know with any depth or intimacy is our own. To know a place, you have to live in the place. This means things like buying groceries, paying rent, getting a loan and so on. You have to spend time doing the banal everyday things that keep a life moving along.
The thing is, in our own country we think we know it with depth. We think we have an intimate knowledge of it. But we don’t. We can only know parts of it and even then we fall far short of complete knowledge. This is because our countries are so many countries.
And that’s why I refer to my country as the Canadas. It’s plural. There are as many Canadas as there are people. In a sense, we are tourists even in our own countries.
The way a programmer in Nova Scotia experiences Canada is not the same as a nurse in Edmonton. A realtor in Fort St. John in north eastern British Columbia does not have the same Canada as the store owner in Montreal, Quebec.
A Muslim entrepreneur in Vancouver has one Canada; an Inuit politician in Nunavut has another.
And they are not the same from day to day.
Sometimes I see a Canadian’s online profile with a map showing all the places they’ve been to in the world. There might be three, maybe four balloons in Canada, and oodles in Europe, South America, southeast Asia and so on. We catalogue where we have been elsewhere.
Maybe Canadians don’t travel as much in Canada because we know we can never see everything: it’s too damn big!
If Canada was a shirt, it would be extra extra extra large.
I think we feel that living where we do, wherever that is in Canada, we know Canada. It’s just not so.
Problem and solution
Canada is an ongoing project in creativity because it involves so many contradictions and opposites from landscape to weather to people. Southern Alberta, down in the area of Fort MacLeod, is the opposite of southern New Brunswick. It is almost the difference between a desert and a rain forest.
That’s just landscape. People? Oh my!
This is really where the ongoing problem solving exercise happens. We want the collective unity of “Canadians” while at the same time wanting everyone to retain their differences. Sometimes we refer to it as a “cultural mosaic.”
But of course, that means accommodation and that begins with an understanding of how plural we are.
Solutions
I know many people don’t care about hockey, but stay with me a moment. It’s a good example of Canadians and problem solving and finding solutions – as well as what those solutions mean.
Since time began, the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ) has been broadcasting hockey games in Canada. The CBC is a publicly owned company supported by Canadian tax dollars. It has a very specific mandate which, put simply, is this: your content will be Canada.
This means hockey games with Canadian teams, currently Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver. The thing is, since teams often play on the same night, which game do you show? How do you keep everyone happy?
Well, you don’t. But you try. Canadians regularly complain about it. But the CBC does the best it can by putting one game on the national network, the one they hope the most people will want to see, and in specific regions, like Montreal, broadcasting the game of that area’s team.
Since Canada is so big, with six time zones, they can break it up between eastern and western games, the west getting underway usually several hours after those of the east.
The end result is games get shown. Someone is always unhappy. But overall and over time, it works. Not perfectly; but it works. Of course, much of the solution is the result of technology. It has allowed for better and more creative solutions.
Hockey and TV are pretty unimportant compared to larger social issues but to a large extent Canada’s creative problem solving mirrors the CBC’s solution for hockey. Some solutions work better than others, but that’s how it goes. We accommodate as best we can and manage to be one country, singular and plural all at once.
Delight, not pride
I don’t recall ever having a feeling of pride about Canada. What I feel most is delight. And I feel comfortable. Canada feels so much a part of me, so much an aspect of who and what I am, feeling pride in it would be like feeling pride in my arm or my leg. I just don’t think or feel that way.
It’s probably true of every country but in the end I see Canada as a work in progress. It’s a place so large, from every perspective, and so perpetually evolving, it can never be fully known. I’m pretty sure about one thing though.
Canada is not a place to be; it is a place to be together.
That, of course, is where the business of creative solutions comes in. And that, in turn, means realizing that what we know is only ever a small part of a larger picture. There is always more to learn, more to see, more people to meet, more to marvel at.
Photos – Bill Wren:
1 – Provincial flags, National Arts Centre, Ottawa, Ontario.
2 – Unknown couple, Killarney Lake, New Brunswick.
3 – Summer skating, West Edmonton Mall, Edmonton, Alberta.
4 – Unknown girl, City Hall, Edmonton, Alberta.
5 – Parliament Hill, Ottawa, Ontario.
