#outsideboxthinking

7 Tips for Outside Box Thinking

By utilizing these tips for outside-box thinking, you can quickly accomplish your goals if you've been trying to stay on top of the crowd.

This week I will be reflecting on the Creative Problem Solving Process and how it influenced my life. For those who don’t know. the creative problem solving process has four main steps:

1)  Clarify -State the Issue -Define key Assessment Criteria 2) Ideate -Diverge -Converge 3)Develop -Power Up -Assess 4) Implement

Based on my personal experiences, the most important critical factor of a successful creative problem solving process is Clarifying the Problem. If you do not clarify the problem and understand it then you may not be able to find a solution to your problem. You might be able to solve some minor issues but not the main or core problem. When assessing a situation, clarifying or understanding the problem is the first and most important part of the problem solving process. Albert Einstein said, “Given an hour to solve a problem, I would spend 55 minutes analyzing the problem and understanding it completely and 5 minutes coming up with a solution.

 When I went through the creative problem solving process in class and outside of class, I contributed in a variety of ways. One of the things I did to help create success was to listen to other’s ideas and defer judgement. This way everyone could feel like they contributed in a positive way and not feel bad by having their idea shot down. Another way that I contributed was encourage those that were a little shy to participate with their own ideas whether or not they were silly. An idea is a good one as it could lead to the solution by combining it with another or using a similar concept. To ensure that the process is more helpful next time, I would ask my group to separate for five minutes and brainstorm alone and then regroup to share ideas. This way there are less distractions and more ideas based on our individual ideas and experiences.

One thing I learned from the creative problem solving process is that in order to solve the core problem we must understand the core problem. Sometimes its not obvious, sometimes we find minor issues and think its the core problem. In order to solve the problem, we need to spend a good portion of our time on figuring out the core problem then everything else will fall into place.