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The Creative Thinking Process |
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Friday, 20 August 2004 |
So where does creative thinking
fit in the problem solving process? Most of us use a basic five-step process to solve problems.
1. Goal
2. Creative Thinking
3. Prioritization
4. Plan/Take Action
5. Evaluation
1. Determine a goal. Often, our goal may be fuzzy or a little off target. And sometimes the goal we set is the wrong one. Creative thinking tools can help you step back and evaluate your objective. They can also aid you in better defining the goal, or changing it. It's important to have a firm, targeted goal before you go to the next step. Plus, as you go through the creative thinking process, you'll want to reflect back on the goal periodically to make sure what you are after still makes sense. Creative thinking tools are great for helping evaluate this as well.
2. Crank up the creative thinking. You want to generate as many new and creative ideas as you can. Ironically, this step is the most important step and is usually the most overlooked. All too often, when looking for new solutions and creative ideas we quickly come up with a few alternatives and stop. The ideal scenario is to take your time and generate as many ideas as you can. Why? Because the more ideas you have to choose from, the better chance that you'll find a superior solution. You want to generate hundreds or thousands of new ideas. Creative thinking tools can help you do exactly that. These tools will help you expand ten good ideas into those hundreds or thousands.
3. Prioritize it. The prioritization phase is pretty straight forward and most of us are good at it. Why? Because most of us are pretty darn good critics. Plus we all have common tools to help us prioritize.
4. Plan your course and take some action. Next, of course, we develop a plan and execute it. Most of the time, we move to this step too quickly. Your key to success in creative problem solving is to spend a lot more time up front generating new and innovative ideas before trying to build a plan around them. Keep the creative thinking process in mind and the need for using creative thinking tools next time you try and solve a problem.
5. Assess your results. If you've taken the right amount of time to create new and innovative ideas, this step should be easy.
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 16 November 2004 )
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