January 14, 2025

Problem Solving Requires More Than Simple Creativity – It Needs Process

by Chris Griffiths posted in Problem Solving.

Problem solving requires creativity. However, to get the most out of a situation, we have to learn to use our brain to question, explore, invent, discover and create – in other words we need to be hugely generative in our thinking. Whether we’re looking to solve a business problem, find new ways of working, change policies or to boost sales, it’s through using generative thinking mechanisms that we can produce insights and ideas which we would never have envisaged through conventional problem solving methods.

My belief is that for the majority of the adult population, creativity is an untapped resource that’s withered through lack of use. Young children can generate highly original solutions to problems because they aren’t bound by the rigid conventions and methodologies of adulthood. By contrast, adults will try to pull a solution from their repository of knowledge, solving the problem in a way that’s been proven to work in the past.

A common issue with senior executives is that they’ll use their sharp reasoning skills to pick out a tried and tested solution from their wealth of experience and will then impose it onto the problem, forcing it to work no matter what. More often than not, they’re trying to fit a round peg into a square hole – the solution just isn’t a good match for the problem. We have to understand that an increasing number of today’s business problems have few or no precedents, so this line of approach isn’t likely to get us very far! It’s crucial that we start thinking in terms of new possibilities rather than looking for ready-made solutions.

We can all be creative, even in the later stages of life. We just have to be very purposeful about it. In writing my books, my aim was to offer a self-contained and systematic guide to reawakening our innate creative abilities and tackling our problems and opportunities innovatively.

First we have to free our minds from the shackles of limited thinking that constrain our creativity. We can then apply directed principles, processes and techniques to stimulate the kind of original thinking that brings the best possible answers to our everyday (and not so everyday!) challenges.

Though it may appear otherwise, being creative isn’t a process that occurs just by chance. Good ideas usually arise when people are actively engaged in seeking them out; when they’re curious, enquiring and on the alert for opportunities.

This notion is reinforced by additional experiments we’ve conducted using the our global Creativity Test. The pilot group who participated in the original study came from our vast database of contacts and, for this reason, could confidently be said to have a general interest in mental literacy and ‘creativity-enhancing’ tools such as Mind Maps.

When we compare the results of this pilot group with groups of participants who have no special interest in the brain or thinking, we gain valuable insight into exactly how much inquisitiveness and directed effort influences levels of creativity. For instance, in the ‘Visual Imagination’ category, our pilot group scored an average of 7.15 out of a total of 10, compared to a mere 4.3 average within the test groups. In every single category the pilot group consistently demonstrated far greater levels of divergent thinking, idea flexibility and original thought than the test groups. Quite clearly, active interest and pursuit of creativity and mental improvement are important factors in determining our creative ability. It’s not just a case of who has the ‘natural talent’ for it.

This begs the question – how much more creative and innovative can we be if we develop our interest and really start to put a process behind our thinking? If we strive to develop processes and systems that systemise problem solving and decision making. It makes the difference.