Introduction to Creative Problem Solving
This is part of a short series that we’re calling Thoughtwrestling Moves. We’re going to describe a series of tools that you can use to help wrestle your thoughts to the ground, solve problems, and bring your great ideas to life.
This is an introduction to each of these tools. There are hundreds if not thousands of blog posts, articles, or other publications which describe these topics in much more detail. We plan to do deeper dives into these tools on Thoughtwrestling but, for now, we’re just going to help you get acquainted with them.
Today’s article is about Creative Problem Solving.
What is Creative Problem Solving?
We all have problems we want to solve. More specifically, we have things that we want to do, but we don’t know how we can do them.
Creative Problem Solving (we’ll abbreviate it as CPS) refers to a type of problem solving techniques that use some of the same techniques as brainstorming (previous days link). As a matter of fact, Alex Osborn, a famous advertising executive who coined the term brainstorming, was a co-creator of the CPS methodology, along with Sidney Parnes.
In his book Jack’s Notebook, creativity and innovation expert Gregg Fraley describes CPS in very simple terms:
In the simplest of terms, it’s about list making and choice making. If you are faced with a challenge, do this: first make a list of options or ideas – then make a choice. But remember to make your list without judgement. When you stop and critique and idea, you hinder the flow of the imagination. Instead delay judging your ideas until after you’ve created a full list. This is the essence of the CPS process.
In this article we’re going to stick to the version of CPS that Fraley describes in Jack’s Notebook.
Fraley’s version of CPS has the following six steps:
| Step | Description |
| Identify The Challenge | List the different things about your problem |
| Facts and Feelings Exploration | Describe what you know about your problem and how you feel about it |
| Problem Framing and Reframing | Restate your problem as a question in as many ways as you can within a time limit to come up with a reframing of the problem |
| Idea Generation | Develop multiple ideas to resolve the reframed problem |
| Solution Development | Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your ideas; try to make them stronger and/or weaker |
| Action Planning | List everything you need to do to implement your solution and then reduce it down to the minimum number of steps to make it happen. Commit! |
This is just a simple summary of the concepts behind CPS. For a more detailed look at Fraley’s version of CPS, including examples and a more detailed set of steps, you can read Fraley’s book Jack’s Notebook: A business novel about creative problem solving
And now: a challenge for you! We’d like to see some real-life examples of people putting CPS to use in real life. Here are three ways to do this:
- Send us an E-Mail (thoughtwrestler@gmail.com ) and tell us how you did it (let us know if we can reprint the results here at the blog!)
- Leave us a comment in the Comments section of this post and tell us your story.
- Write a blog post (or reuse an old blog post) and link to this post (it would be excellent and greatly appreciated if you used the phrase creative problem solving as the anchor text for your link back here). We’ll link back to you in return!
Stay tuned for more Thoughtwrestling Moves!
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