Problem Solving

In today’s competitive world, coming up with creative ideas sooner than your competitor can make all the difference between success and failure. However, creativity is not something that you can force people into or expect them to suddenly become creative by sheer will power.

Instead, creativity seems to be highly dependant on the state of your mind. It is about your brain. If you can provide a suitable environment for your brain, it can deliver many novel ideas rather quickly. On the other hand, a tired or stressed mind is almost useless for anything creative as if it can’t be set free.

Hence, to become creative you should simply focus on setting up your environment and adopt your behaviour in such a way to maximise your chances of success.

This article provides a series of guidelines you can use to become more creative.

In this exercise, delegates will learn how to use futures wheel to perform a structured brainstorming to predict the future of a specific topic or systematically capture the effect of various future developments on each other.

The method is a simple yet powerful visual technique that is widely used by people involved in understanding the consequences of change or development.

In this exercises delegates learn to use analogies to find novel solutions to problems. Specific analogies are examined and mapped to a problem domain for inspiration of similar unique solutions.

When engaged in a brainstorming session on productivity, you want to maximise your search efficiency in order to systematically explore all areas and get the best from the time spend on the problem. A great way to do this is to expand and shrink the problem so you can come up with new ideas, get rid of the bad ideas and move forward.

Effectively, you can use the following 5 techniques:

• Expand. Expand the problem by thinking of new associations on all directions.
• Reduce. Reduce the scope.
• Reverse. Come up with something opposite to explore new avenues.
• Eliminate. Remove those ideas that don’t make any sense to reduce your search space and increase the efficiency of your brainstorming. After all, you can’t spend forever on this topic so you need to setup boundaries.

The following exercise helps the delegates to use this method.

This activity encourages solution generation by looking at the problem from a different prospective. By changing the way we describe a problem we can come up with ideas to fix it. This exercise works best with a group of delegates who normally work together or belong to the same organisation.

This exercise encourages creativity and helps delegates to come up with a larger variety of solutions. The activity also enables participants to evaluate and compare the influence and effect of using expert views in solving problems. This activity is suitable for groups of people who have access to Internet and phone during the training session.

This exercise allows participants to use others’ knowledge or experience in solving their problems. The activity also encourages asking for help from colleagues and team mates in solving problems and coming up with a variety of solutions.

This is a fun activity which encourages delegates to become creative with their ideas and share them with others. They will learn the value of quick thinking and quick judgement since sometimes you may need to rely on gut instincts to cut your search space and save time looking for solutions. If the delegates know each other or are from the same organisation, a common problem can be chosen as the main topic which helps them to use this exercise to brainstorming the problem.

This is quick quiz on body language. It encourages delegates to put their knowledge on body language to test and see how well they can respond to realistic situations.

This fun exercise generates a lot of laugh and is very effective in putting participants in a good mood especially after a long training session. Although designed as a communication exercise, it can easily be used as a team building exercise or energiser.

This fun and creative exercise allows participants to work within a team and brainstorm different ideas to come up with the right answer.

The problem presented in this activity encourages a better understanding of the effect of team work in problem solving. Although looking manageable individually at first, participants soon realise the need for cooperation with team members in solving the problem. This exercise is quite applicable to everyday work and it encourages delegates to examine their own behaviour and understand best approaches. It also allows delegates to consider long term effect of problems.