Creative Problem Solving (CPS)
It’s a common fact that all of us as human beings are dealing with unlimited obstacles and challenges in a daily basis. And it’s widely known that overcoming them isn’t easy especially when it comes to the strategy and process followed. Indirectly we feel obligated to find innovative solutions for each problem or challenge we face at work or home. For this reason, we need to encourage the methodological and the interpersonal skills we demonstrate daily.
Creative problem solving (CPS) is the strategic process to find answers to problems and ways to take advantage of opportunities. Key steps in the process include: identifying a problem, generating alternative solutions, and selecting the best/right answer.
The picture above can guide us to undrestand clearly the steps of the creative problem solving.
Starting with the first step
- Stay Informed : which means that we need to be aware of our environment and what’s going on ! We need to be informed of our own business, our relations, our challenges and situations. Taking the marketers as an example. In order to stay informed, they need to follow and track the industry, the customers, the competition, the competition’s customers, their own company from the outside and the inside.
Next comes
Problem Recognition : it is the ability to notice that change is about to take 0. The earlier you detect changes, the faster you can adapt to what you’re doing. Taking the example of how marketers are taking advantage of the current state of society, rushing out and crowding stores to experience massive savings due to the tradition of Black Friday.
- Problem Identification : Once we realize that we’ve got a problem, we need to determine the main / root cause of the issue encountered by asking “ what caused this issue? “ which would lead to developing the appropriate remedy. As an example, we will be coming up with recommended solutions based on our neede and how we evaluate things.
- Brainstorming : When we generate the idea we have, trying to think up new ideas and relate between each one of them. When we talk about brainstorming, we can highlight four main words { innovate, solve, grow, think, or create.}
- Decision Making : Reviewing all the ideas generated and measuring them against the objectives of what we are trying to solve. Most likely, we need to filter the recommend options “ solutions “ we have and choose the option that best fits both the problem being solved and meets our needs.
- Plan Crafting : It can be about preparing our planned approach or outline. It may be a business plan, a marketing plan, or just the approach to solving a specific challenge.
- Be The Champion : To champion is to fight or argue for a cause. Our cause is our stated objective, our plan, and the benefits of implementing that plan.
- Implement : Taking an action and trying to implement our plan and almost all the pre work done before. And this takes us back to the first stage Stay Informed in order to do some adjustments and monitor the project.
In a nutshell
The problem we identified in the Problem Identification stage was turned into an objective. The next step was to brainstorm to create potential solutions for that problem. After we have filtered the fewer, bigger, better solutions in our decision making step, we are now ready to create the plan; a blueprint that will create action for the solutions and meet the stated objective.