Problem Selection
When is it useful to use your creativity to solve a problem, and when is it not?
When we show people in our training programs just how powerful a tool creative thinking can be, they suddenly want to use it on everything. They end up reinventing where they don't need to quite a bit. The truth is, it's only relevant to use creativity in problem solving for a small subset of the problems we have.
Today's First Activity: Utilizing the Four I's for Problem Selection.
Knowing when to use creativity to come up with lots of ideas on how to solve a problem, is as simple as using the mnemonic below.
- Influence - You must own the problem, or at least be able to influence it.
- Importance - The problem needs to make near the top of your to do list.
- Immediacy - It needs to have at least a little urgency (especially if you're a New Yorker).
- Imagination - It must require imagination (new ideas) to solve.
Our first activity is very simple.
- Write down three to five problems you are currently trying to solve.
- Explore how urgent they are, how much influence you have over them, how much each of them require imagination, and so on according to the 4 I's above in a conversation with the person, or people, next to you.
- Score your list of problems across the four I's (Let's use a scale from 1 to 10, so that a perfect score would total up to 40.)
- Lastly, a gut check. Ask yourself,
How much would it mean to me or others if I had a good solution to this problem?
for each of your problems. Would it absolutely change your day-to-day life or that of someone you serve, or would it have a measly effect at best?
After you've scored your problems, and done a gut check, select one to share.
Next we're going to pick a volunteer from our audience and all generate ideas to help them solve their selected problem.
Side Note: If you want to work on your problem after the event you can find instructions on how to get started generating creative ideas here: First Rule of Creative Thinking »
Helping a Friend
Part 2! We're going to demonstrate how to come up with lots of ideas to help a friend with their selected problem.
We've asked for a volunteer and we're going to help them with their challenge. Our job is to send them ideas for potential solutions.
Please take out your phones (and without getting sucked into a whirlwind of texts and notifications or cat memes and pictures of food) open up your email client and send your ideas.
Send ideas to » 183ideas@gmail.com
If you're having a little writer's block, there's a little reading (or listening, there's an audio player up top) for later at the bottom of the article we linked to earlier: First Rule of Creative Thinking »
Costa Michailidis
Content from Costa
What Is Innovation? - The word 'innovation' has become more and more common, but what does it mean?
Reclaim Your Creativity - Many of us don't identify as creative, but it's high time we all reclaim our creativity.
First Rule of Creative Thinking - Want better ideas? Come up with lots of ideas.
Top 5 Innovation Program Pitfalls - Watch outs for your top talent innovation learning programs.
The Best First Thing to Do to Be a More Innovative Company - What if innovation is already happening at your organization, and all you need to do is discover it?