creative problem solving stories

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Article • 10 min read

Creative Problem Solving

Finding Innovative Solutions to Challenges

By the Mind Tools Content Team

Imagine that you're vacuuming your house in a hurry because you've got friends coming over. Frustratingly, you're working hard but you're not getting very far. You kneel down, open up the vacuum cleaner, and pull out the bag. In a cloud of dust, you realize that it's full... again. Coughing, you empty it and wonder why vacuum cleaners with bags still exist!

James Dyson, inventor and founder of Dyson® vacuum cleaners, had exactly the same problem, and he used creative problem solving to find the answer. While many companies focused on developing a better vacuum cleaner filter, he realized that he had to think differently and find a more creative solution. So, he devised a revolutionary way to separate the dirt from the air, and invented the world's first bagless vacuum cleaner. [1]

Creative problem solving (CPS) is a way of solving problems or identifying opportunities when conventional thinking has failed. It encourages you to find fresh perspectives and come up with innovative solutions, so that you can formulate a plan to overcome obstacles and reach your goals.

In this article, we'll explore what CPS is, and we'll look at its key principles. We'll also provide a model that you can use to generate creative solutions.

About Creative Problem Solving

Alex Osborn, founder of the Creative Education Foundation, first developed creative problem solving in the 1940s, along with the term "brainstorming." And, together with Sid Parnes, he developed the Osborn-Parnes Creative Problem Solving Process. Despite its age, this model remains a valuable approach to problem solving. [2]

The early Osborn-Parnes model inspired a number of other tools. One of these is the 2011 CPS Learner's Model, also from the Creative Education Foundation, developed by Dr Gerard J. Puccio, Marie Mance, and co-workers. In this article, we'll use this modern four-step model to explore how you can use CPS to generate innovative, effective solutions.

Why Use Creative Problem Solving?

Dealing with obstacles and challenges is a regular part of working life, and overcoming them isn't always easy. To improve your products, services, communications, and interpersonal skills, and for you and your organization to excel, you need to encourage creative thinking and find innovative solutions that work.

CPS asks you to separate your "divergent" and "convergent" thinking as a way to do this. Divergent thinking is the process of generating lots of potential solutions and possibilities, otherwise known as brainstorming. And convergent thinking involves evaluating those options and choosing the most promising one. Often, we use a combination of the two to develop new ideas or solutions. However, using them simultaneously can result in unbalanced or biased decisions, and can stifle idea generation.

For more on divergent and convergent thinking, and for a useful diagram, see the book "Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making." [3]

Core Principles of Creative Problem Solving

CPS has four core principles. Let's explore each one in more detail:

• Divergent and convergent thinking must be balanced. The key to creativity is learning how to identify and balance divergent and convergent thinking (done separately), and knowing when to practice each one.
• Ask problems as questions. When you rephrase problems and challenges as open-ended questions with multiple possibilities, it's easier to come up with solutions. Asking these types of questions generates lots of rich information, while asking closed questions tends to elicit short answers, such as confirmations or disagreements. Problem statements tend to generate limited responses, or none at all.
• Defer or suspend judgment. As Alex Osborn learned from his work on brainstorming, judging solutions early on tends to shut down idea generation. Instead, there's an appropriate and necessary time to judge ideas during the convergence stage.
• Focus on "Yes, and," rather than "No, but." Language matters when you're generating information and ideas. "Yes, and" encourages people to expand their thoughts, which is necessary during certain stages of CPS. Using the word "but" – preceded by "yes" or "no" – ends conversation, and often negates what's come before it.

How to Use the Tool

Let's explore how you can use each of the four steps of the CPS Learner's Model (shown in figure 1, below) to generate innovative ideas and solutions.

Figure 1 – CPS Learner's Model

Explore the Vision

Identify your goal, desire or challenge. This is a crucial first step because it's easy to assume, incorrectly, that you know what the problem is. However, you may have missed something or have failed to understand the issue fully, and defining your objective can provide clarity. Read our article, 5 Whys , for more on getting to the root of a problem quickly.

Gather Data

Once you've identified and understood the problem, you can collect information about it and develop a clear understanding of it. Make a note of details such as who and what is involved, all the relevant facts, and everyone's feelings and opinions.

Formulate Questions

When you've increased your awareness of the challenge or problem you've identified, ask questions that will generate solutions. Think about the obstacles you might face and the opportunities they could present.

Explore Ideas

Generate ideas that answer the challenge questions you identified in step 1. It can be tempting to consider solutions that you've tried before, as our minds tend to return to habitual thinking patterns that stop us from producing new ideas. However, this is a chance to use your creativity .

Brainstorming and Mind Maps are great ways to explore ideas during this divergent stage of CPS. And our articles, Encouraging Team Creativity , Problem Solving , Rolestorming , Hurson's Productive Thinking Model , and The Four-Step Innovation Process , can also help boost your creativity.

See our Brainstorming resources within our Creativity section for more on this.

Formulate Solutions

This is the convergent stage of CPS, where you begin to focus on evaluating all of your possible options and come up with solutions. Analyze whether potential solutions meet your needs and criteria, and decide whether you can implement them successfully. Next, consider how you can strengthen them and determine which ones are the best "fit." Our articles, Critical Thinking and ORAPAPA , are useful here.

4. Implement

Formulate a plan.

Once you've chosen the best solution, it's time to develop a plan of action. Start by identifying resources and actions that will allow you to implement your chosen solution. Next, communicate your plan and make sure that everyone involved understands and accepts it.

There have been many adaptations of CPS since its inception, because nobody owns the idea.

For example, Scott Isaksen and Donald Treffinger formed The Creative Problem Solving Group Inc . and the Center for Creative Learning , and their model has evolved over many versions. Blair Miller, Jonathan Vehar and Roger L. Firestien also created their own version, and Dr Gerard J. Puccio, Mary C. Murdock, and Marie Mance developed CPS: The Thinking Skills Model. [4] Tim Hurson created The Productive Thinking Model , and Paul Reali developed CPS: Competencies Model. [5]

Sid Parnes continued to adapt the CPS model by adding concepts such as imagery and visualization , and he founded the Creative Studies Project to teach CPS. For more information on the evolution and development of the CPS process, see Creative Problem Solving Version 6.1 by Donald J. Treffinger, Scott G. Isaksen, and K. Brian Dorval. [6]

Creative Problem Solving (CPS) Infographic

See our infographic on Creative Problem Solving .

Creative problem solving (CPS) is a way of using your creativity to develop new ideas and solutions to problems. The process is based on separating divergent and convergent thinking styles, so that you can focus your mind on creating at the first stage, and then evaluating at the second stage.

There have been many adaptations of the original Osborn-Parnes model, but they all involve a clear structure of identifying the problem, generating new ideas, evaluating the options, and then formulating a plan for successful implementation.

[1] Entrepreneur (2012). James Dyson on Using Failure to Drive Success [online]. Available here . [Accessed May 27, 2022.]

[2] Creative Education Foundation (2015). The CPS Process [online]. Available here . [Accessed May 26, 2022.]

[3] Kaner, S. et al. (2014). 'Facilitator′s Guide to Participatory Decision–Making,' San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

[4] Puccio, G., Mance, M., and Murdock, M. (2011). 'Creative Leadership: Skils That Drive Change' (2nd Ed.), Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

[5] OmniSkills (2013). Creative Problem Solving [online]. Available here . [Accessed May 26, 2022].

[6] Treffinger, G., Isaksen, S., and Dorval, B. (2010). Creative Problem Solving (CPS Version 6.1). Center for Creative Learning, Inc. & Creative Problem Solving Group, Inc. Available here .

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The Success Stories of Creative Problem Solvers

Introduction.

In today’s rapidly changing world, the need for creative problem solvers has never been greater. These individuals have the ability to think outside the box, challenge conventional wisdom, and find innovative solutions to complex issues. Their unique perspectives and creative approaches play a crucial role in driving positive change and making a significant impact on society.

The purpose of this blog is to showcase the success stories of creative problem solvers who have made a difference in their respective fields. By exploring their journeys, we hope to inspire others to embrace their creativity and find innovative solutions to the problems they may encounter.

The stories shared in this blog will highlight the achievements of individuals who have navigated through obstacles, taken risks, and discovered groundbreaking solutions to real-world problems. These stories serve as a reminder that one person’s creativity can have a ripple effect, influencing industries and communities far beyond their own sphere of influence.

Through these narratives, we hope to shed light on the power of creative problem solving and the incredible impact it can have on society. These stories may encourage readers to think differently, challenge existing norms, and explore innovative approaches in their own lives and professions.

As you read through each story, consider the unique challenges these individuals faced and how they were able to overcome them. By sharing their experiences, we aim to provide valuable insights and lessons that can help others overcome their own obstacles and push past limitations.

Creativity knows no boundaries, and the success stories highlighted in this blog will demonstrate that. From the fields of technology to art, healthcare to education, and many more, these stories will showcase the diverse ways in which creative problem solvers have left an indelible mark on their industries and communities.

We invite you to join us on this journey of exploration and inspiration. Let these stories serve as a call to action - a reminder that each and every one of us has the potential to be a creative problem solver and make a positive impact in our own unique way. As you finish reading each success story, share this blog with others who may find it equally inspiring, and together, let’s celebrate the triumphs of these extraordinary individuals and pave the way for a future filled with innovation and positive change.

Story 1: [Name of Creative Problem Solver]

Background information.

Name : Jane Smith Problem : Lack of access to clean water in rural communities

Jane Smith, a passionate engineer, grew up in a small rural community where access to clean water was a persistent problem. She witnessed friends and family members falling ill due to waterborne diseases caused by the use of contaminated water sources. Determined to find a solution, she dedicated her career to addressing this critical issue.

Creative Solution

Jane started by researching existing methods of water filtration and treatment. She realized that many conventional systems were expensive, difficult to maintain, and not suitable for rural communities. Drawing inspiration from natural filtration processes, she came up with a simple but innovative solution - using locally available materials to create DIY water filters.

Jane designed a filtration system using sand, gravel, and activated carbon, which could effectively remove impurities and pathogens from water. She also developed a manual for building these filters, making sure the process was easy to understand and replicate.

The impact of Jane’s solution was significant. She piloted her DIY water filters in her own village and observed a drastic reduction in waterborne illnesses. Encouraged by this success, she began sharing her design and manual with neighboring communities.

Word of Jane’s creative solution quickly spread, and soon, villages across the region started adopting her DIY water filters. As more people gained access to clean water, the number of water-related diseases plummeted, leading to improved overall health in these communities.

Challenges and Overcoming Them

While implementing her solution, Jane faced several challenges. The main hurdle was convincing skeptics who were resistant to change and hesitant to believe in a simple, DIY filtration system. She encountered doubts from both communities and government officials, who questioned the effectiveness and durability of her solution.

To overcome these challenges, Jane conducted extensive workshops and training sessions to educate people about the merits of her DIY water filters. She also collaborated with local NGOs, health organizations, and government agencies to conduct independent tests and assessments. These efforts helped build trust and credibility around her solution, ultimately leading to widespread adoption.

Recognition and Awards

Jane’s groundbreaking work did not go unnoticed. Her innovative solution and dedication to improving access to clean water earned her numerous accolades. She received the “Engineering Innovation Award” from the National Institute of Engineers, recognizing her as a creative problem solver in the field. Jane was also invited to speak at international conferences and seminars to share her success story and inspire fellow engineers to tackle critical societal issues.

Story 2: Elizabeth Holmes

Elizabeth Holmes is a prime example of a creative problem solver who revolutionized the healthcare industry. She founded a company called Theranos with the vision of making blood testing faster, cheaper, and more accessible.

In the field of healthcare, blood tests have traditionally been expensive and time-consuming. Patients often have to wait several days to receive their test results, which can delay important medical decisions. Elizabeth Holmes recognized this problem and set out to find a solution.

The Creative Solution

Holmes developed a groundbreaking technology that she called the “Edison” device. This device was capable of conducting a comprehensive range of blood tests using just a few drops of blood from a finger prick. The tests could be performed quickly, with results available within hours, at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.

Impact on the Industry and Community

The impact of Holmes’ solution was immense. Theranos gained widespread attention and secured partnerships and contracts with major healthcare providers and pharmacies. The Edison device held the promise of transforming healthcare by providing faster and more affordable blood testing for everyone.

Challenges Faced and Overcoming Them

However, Holmes and Theranos faced several challenges along the way. Questions arose about the accuracy and reliability of their blood tests. Journalists and researchers began to question the validity of the technology, ultimately leading to a series of investigations and legal actions. It was eventually revealed that the claims made by Holmes about the effectiveness of the Edison device were exaggerated and misleading.

Despite the controversy surrounding her later actions, Elizabeth Holmes initially gained significant recognition and received numerous awards for her innovation and entrepreneurship. She was named on TIME magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world, and Theranos was valued at billions of dollars.

While the story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos ultimately took a negative turn, it highlights the importance of creative problem-solving in identifying and addressing significant challenges in industries like healthcare.

Story 3: Akira Yoshino - Inventor of the Lithium-ion Battery

Background information: the need for portable and efficient energy storage.

In the late 1970s, there was a growing demand for portable electronic devices such as calculators, cameras, and eventually, mobile phones. While small in size, these devices required a reliable and efficient source of energy to operate. Traditional batteries like alkaline and nickel-cadmium were heavy, had limited energy storage capacity, and suffered from issues like memory effect and self-discharge.

Creative Solution: The Development of the Lithium-ion Battery

Akira Yoshino, a Japanese chemist, recognized the potential of lithium-based materials for energy storage. In the 1980s, he conducted extensive research on how to overcome the safety and stability issues associated with pure lithium. He developed a prototype of the lithium-ion battery using a lithium cobalt oxide cathode and a carbon-based anode. This design allowed for efficient ion movement, reversible reactions, and improved safety.

Impact: Revolutionizing Portable Electronics and Renewable Energy Storage

Yoshino’s invention of the lithium-ion battery revolutionized the portable electronics industry. With its high energy density, longer lifespan, and lightweight design, the lithium-ion battery quickly became the preferred choice for devices like smartphones, laptops, and electric vehicles. It enabled the development of smaller and more powerful devices, paving the way for the digital revolution.

Additionally, the lithium-ion battery played a crucial role in advancing renewable energy storage. Its ability to store energy efficiently made it possible for renewable sources like solar and wind power to be used more effectively. The integration of lithium-ion batteries into grid storage systems allowed for capturing excess energy during peak production and supplying it during times of high demand.

One of the main challenges Yoshino faced was finding a material that could safely store and release lithium ions. After extensive research, he discovered that lithium cobalt oxide was a suitable cathode material. He also faced challenges related to scaling up the production of lithium-ion batteries, ensuring their safety, and optimizing their performance.

Yoshino collaborated with various companies and researchers to address these challenges. His partnership with Sony Corporation was instrumental in commercializing the lithium-ion battery. They worked together to improve the battery’s safety features, increase its energy capacity, and reduce its production costs.

Akira Yoshino’s groundbreaking work on the lithium-ion battery has garnered significant recognition and numerous awards. In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with John B. Goodenough and Stanley Whittingham, for their contributions to the development of lithium-ion batteries. This prestigious award further solidified Yoshino’s position as a pioneer in the field of portable energy storage.

Conclusion: Inspiring Innovation and Future Potential

Akira Yoshino’s story demonstrates the incredible impact that creative problem solvers can have on society. His invention of the lithium-ion battery not only revolutionized the electronics industry but also paved the way for cleaner and more sustainable energy technologies. Yoshino’s dedication to finding creative solutions to complex problems and his commitment to collaboration and innovation are qualities that can inspire others to think outside the box and tackle the challenges of their own industries and communities.

In conclusion, the success stories of these creative problem solvers inspire us all to think outside the box and tackle problems in innovative ways. Through their determination and ingenuity, they have made a lasting impact on their industries and communities.

We have seen how [Name of Creative Problem Solver] addressed a significant problem in their field and developed a creative solution that revolutionized the industry. Despite facing numerous challenges, they persevered and overcame obstacles to bring their idea to life. Their solution had a profound impact, improving efficiency, increasing productivity, and transforming the way things were done. Their hard work and dedication were recognized with several awards and accolades, further cementing their status as a creative problem solver.

Similarly, [Name of Creative Problem Solver] saw a problem in their community and used their creativity to come up with an innovative solution. Their idea not only addressed the problem at hand but also had a ripple effect, positively impacting the lives of many. It is through their determination and passion that they were able to overcome obstacles and make a real difference. Their work was acknowledged and celebrated, serving as a testament to their creativity and problem-solving skills.

Lastly, [Name of Creative Problem Solver] tackled a complex issue in their industry and devised a creative solution that was groundbreaking. Their perseverance in the face of challenges demonstrated their commitment to finding innovative solutions. The impact of their work cannot be understated, with their solution providing a new perspective and transforming the way things were done. Their achievements were acknowledged through various awards and recognition, solidifying their reputation as a creative problem solver.

These success stories remind us of the importance of creative problem solving in making a positive impact. They show us that by thinking outside the box, we can overcome obstacles, introduce new ideas, and bring about meaningful change. We are encouraged to take inspiration from these stories and apply creative problem-solving techniques in our own industries or communities.

As we conclude this blog, I urge you to share these inspiring success stories with others who may find them informative and motivational. Together, let’s embrace our creativity, think innovatively, and become the creative problem solvers that our world needs.

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Is mind-reading possible intriguing questions in cognitive psychology, creative problem solving for entrepreneurs, the unexpected twists in creative problem solving, comparing creative problem solving techniques for best results, how to boost your creative problem solving abilities.

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How to Be a More Creative Problem-Solver at Work: 8 Tips

• 01 Mar 2022

The importance of creativity in the workplace—particularly when problem-solving—is undeniable. Business leaders can’t approach new problems with old solutions and expect the same result.

This is where innovation-based processes need to guide problem-solving. Here’s an overview of what creative problem-solving is, along with tips on how to use it in conjunction with design thinking.

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What Is Creative Problem-Solving?

Encountering problems with no clear cause can be frustrating. This occurs when there’s disagreement around a defined problem or research yields unclear results. In such situations, creative problem-solving helps develop solutions, despite a lack of clarity.

While creative problem-solving is less structured than other forms of innovation, it encourages exploring open-ended ideas and shifting perspectives—thereby fostering innovation and easier adaptation in the workplace. It also works best when paired with other innovation-based processes, such as design thinking .

Creative Problem-Solving and Design Thinking

Design thinking is a solutions-based mentality that encourages innovation and problem-solving. It’s guided by an iterative process that Harvard Business School Dean Srikant Datar outlines in four stages in the online course Design Thinking and Innovation :

• Clarify: This stage involves researching a problem through empathic observation and insights.
• Ideate: This stage focuses on generating ideas and asking open-ended questions based on observations made during the clarification stage.
• Develop: The development stage involves exploring possible solutions based on the ideas you generate. Experimentation and prototyping are both encouraged.
• Implement: The final stage is a culmination of the previous three. It involves finalizing a solution’s development and communicating its value to stakeholders.

Although user research is an essential first step in the design thinking process, there are times when it can’t identify a problem’s root cause. Creative problem-solving addresses this challenge by promoting the development of new perspectives.

Leveraging tools like design thinking and creativity at work can further your problem-solving abilities. Here are eight tips for doing so.

8 Creative Problem-Solving Tips

1. empathize with your audience.

A fundamental practice of design thinking’s clarify stage is empathy. Understanding your target audience can help you find creative and relevant solutions for their pain points through observing them and asking questions.

Practice empathy by paying attention to others’ needs and avoiding personal comparisons. The more you understand your audience, the more effective your solutions will be.

2. Reframe Problems as Questions

If a problem is difficult to define, reframe it as a question rather than a statement. For example, instead of saying, "The problem is," try framing around a question like, "How might we?" Think creatively by shifting your focus from the problem to potential solutions.

Consider this hypothetical case study: You’re the owner of a local coffee shop trying to fill your tip jar. Approaching the situation with a problem-focused mindset frames this as: "We need to find a way to get customers to tip more." If you reframe this as a question, however, you can explore: "How might we make it easier for customers to tip?" When you shift your focus from the shop to the customer, you empathize with your audience. You can take this train of thought one step further and consider questions such as: "How might we provide a tipping method for customers who don't carry cash?"

Whether you work at a coffee shop, a startup, or a Fortune 500 company, reframing can help surface creative solutions to problems that are difficult to define.

3. Defer Judgment of Ideas

If you encounter an idea that seems outlandish or unreasonable, a natural response would be to reject it. This instant judgment impedes creativity. Even if ideas seem implausible, they can play a huge part in ideation. It's important to permit the exploration of original ideas.

While judgment can be perceived as negative, it’s crucial to avoid accepting ideas too quickly. If you love an idea, don’t immediately pursue it. Give equal consideration to each proposal and build on different concepts instead of acting on them immediately.

4. Overcome Cognitive Fixedness

Cognitive fixedness is a state of mind that prevents you from recognizing a situation’s alternative solutions or interpretations instead of considering every situation through the lens of past experiences.

Although it's efficient in the short-term, cognitive fixedness interferes with creative thinking because it prevents you from approaching situations unbiased. It's important to be aware of this tendency so you can avoid it.

5. Balance Divergent and Convergent Thinking

One of the key principles of creative problem-solving is the balance of divergent and convergent thinking. Divergent thinking is the process of brainstorming multiple ideas without limitation; open-ended creativity is encouraged. It’s an effective tool for generating ideas, but not every idea can be explored. Divergent thinking eventually needs to be grounded in reality.

Convergent thinking, on the other hand, is the process of narrowing ideas down into a few options. While converging ideas too quickly stifles creativity, it’s an important step that bridges the gap between ideation and development. It's important to strike a healthy balance between both to allow for the ideation and exploration of creative ideas.

6. Use Creative Tools

Using creative tools is another way to foster innovation. Without a clear cause for a problem, such tools can help you avoid cognitive fixedness and abrupt decision-making. Here are several examples:

Problem Stories

Creating a problem story requires identifying undesired phenomena (UDP) and taking note of events that precede and result from them. The goal is to reframe the situations to visualize their cause and effect.

To start, identify a UDP. Then, discover what events led to it. Observe and ask questions of your consumer base to determine the UDP’s cause.

Next, identify why the UDP is a problem. What effect does the UDP have that necessitates changing the status quo? It's helpful to visualize each event in boxes adjacent to one another when answering such questions.

The problem story can be extended in either direction, as long as there are additional cause-and-effect relationships. Once complete, focus on breaking the chains connecting two subsequent events by disrupting the cause-and-effect relationship between them.

Alternate Worlds

The alternate worlds tool encourages you to consider how people from different backgrounds would approach similar situations. For instance, how would someone in hospitality versus manufacturing approach the same problem? This tool isn't intended to instantly solve problems but, rather, to encourage idea generation and creativity.

7. Use Positive Language

It's vital to maintain a positive mindset when problem-solving and avoid negative words that interfere with creativity. Positive language prevents quick judgments and overcomes cognitive fixedness. Instead of "no, but," use words like "yes, and."

Positive language makes others feel heard and valued rather than shut down. This practice doesn’t necessitate agreeing with every idea but instead approaching each from a positive perspective.

Using “yes, and” as a tool for further idea exploration is also effective. If someone presents an idea, build upon it using “yes, and.” What additional features could improve it? How could it benefit consumers beyond its intended purpose?

While it may not seem essential, this small adjustment can make a big difference in encouraging creativity.

8. Practice Design Thinking

Practicing design thinking can make you a more creative problem-solver. While commonly associated with the workplace, adopting a design thinking mentality can also improve your everyday life. Here are several ways you can practice design thinking:

• Learn from others: There are many examples of design thinking in business . Review case studies to learn from others’ successes, research problems companies haven't addressed, and consider alternative solutions using the design thinking process.
• Approach everyday problems with a design thinking mentality: One of the best ways to practice design thinking is to apply it to your daily life. Approach everyday problems using design thinking’s four-stage framework to uncover what solutions it yields.
• Study design thinking: While learning design thinking independently is a great place to start, taking an online course can offer more insight and practical experience. The right course can teach you important skills , increase your marketability, and provide valuable networking opportunities.

Ready to Become a Creative Problem-Solver?

Though creativity comes naturally to some, it's an acquired skill for many. Regardless of which category you're in, improving your ability to innovate is a valuable endeavor. Whether you want to bolster your creativity or expand your professional skill set, taking an innovation-based course can enhance your problem-solving.

If you're ready to become a more creative problem-solver, explore Design Thinking and Innovation , one of our online entrepreneurship and innovation courses . If you aren't sure which course is the right fit, download our free course flowchart to determine which best aligns with your goals.

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Creative Problem-Solving with Ezra Jack Keats

• Resources & Preparation
• Instructional Plan
• Related Resources

Each day of this lesson, students listen as the teacher reads a different picture book by Ezra Jack Keats. Following the story, class discussion focuses on the problem that the main character faces and the related solution that the character chooses. An interactive bulletin board in the classroom allows students to create their own solutions to various problems that they face personally. After each read-aloud and discussion, students compare the different stories and plots using a story mapping graphic organizer. As a culminating project, students choose their own characters, define a problem and a solution appropriate for their characters, and then write their own problem-solving stories.

Featured Resources

Problem and Solution Organizer : Students can use this simple graphic organizer to note the problems and solutions characters face.

Problem Solution handout : This graphic organizer can help students plan their own problem-solution story.

From Theory to Practice

Researchers such as Dolores Durkin (1961), Margaret Clark (1976), Regie Routman (1988; 1991), and Kathy Short (1995) have found evidence that children who are immersed in rich, authentic literary experiences become highly engaged in literature and develop literary awareness. Their studies revealed that positive and meaningful experiences with books and written language play a critical role in the development of literacy skills. Other researchers have found that students acquired reading and thinking strategies in literature-based programs that included teacher-led comprehension instruction (Block, 1993; Baumann, 1997; and Goldenberg, 1992/1993). Through the exploration of picture books that feature problem-solving themes, this lesson highlights a familiar structure in works of literature, one which bridges directly to critical thinking strategies students can tap in their real-world experiences.

Further Reading

Common Core Standards

This resource has been aligned to the Common Core State Standards for states in which they have been adopted. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, CCSS alignments are forthcoming.

State Standards

This lesson has been aligned to standards in the following states. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, standard alignments are not currently available for that state.

NCTE/IRA National Standards for the English Language Arts

• 1. Students read a wide range of print and nonprint texts to build an understanding of texts, of themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world; to acquire new information; to respond to the needs and demands of society and the workplace; and for personal fulfillment. Among these texts are fiction and nonfiction, classic and contemporary works.
• 3. Students apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts. They draw on their prior experience, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features (e.g., sound-letter correspondence, sentence structure, context, graphics).
• 5. Students employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.

Materials and Technology

A Letter to Amy , The Trip , Pet Show , The Goggles , and Jennie's Hat , all by Ezra Jack Keats

• Problem Solution handout
• Problem and Solution Organizer
• Problem and Solution Interactive Bulletin Board diagram

Preparation

• Gather the Ezra Jack Keats titles listed ( A Letter to Amy , The Trip , Pet Show , The Goggles , and Jennie's Hat ) and a variety of Keats' other books ; obtain the movie The Snowy Day and More Ezra Jack Keats Stories .
• Create the Problem and Solution Bulletin Board in your classroom. Write problems on paper and attach envelopes below each problem labeled "solutions." Attach another envelope with blank paper that students may fill out and put in each solution envelope. Problems you write might include an argument with a friend, having trouble with schoolwork, and other problems with which students can easily identify. See the Bulletin Board Diagram for a sample layout.
• Review this list of Read-Aloud Do's and Don'ts for pointers before starting the unit.
• Print out enough copies of the Problem and Solution Organizer and Problem Solution handout for your students.
• Gather construction paper, crayons, markers, and colored pencils, chart paper, and writing paper.
• Test the Story Mapping interactive on your computers to familiarize yourself with the tool and ensure that you have the Flash plug-in installed. You can download the plug-in from the Technical Support page .

Student Objectives

Students will

• participate in class discussions about predictions and story elements such as characters, problems, and solutions.
• participate in class discussions comparing and contrasting books.
• add solutions to the problem and solution bulletin board.
• read in groups and complete story maps together.
• compose a story with a problem and solution.

Session One: <em>A Letter to Amy</em>

• Review A Letter to Amy yourself before the session begins. In the story, Peter wants to invite Amy to his party, but she is a girl. His solution is to write her a letter.
• Share some background on the overall project by introducing Keats and his writing. Keats is not only a good writer, but also a wonderful artist. His books are beautiful to look at. He also has characters that are in many of his books. Ask students to look for details that demonstrate how creative the characters are in each story.
• What do you see on the cover?
• What do you think this story is about?
• What characters are in the story?
• What do you think will happen next?
• Why is Peter writing a letter?
• What happens when he mails it?
• How does Peter feel at his party?
• What do you think Peter wishes for?
• Introduce the concepts of problem and solution. Explain that most stories have a problem that a character faces. The exciting part of many stories is the way that the character explores options and decides what to do to fix the problem. This is called the solution.
• Ask students to describe the problem and solution that Peter faces in A Letter to Amy .
• Make a Story Map Organizer together on chart paper, listing the title, characters, problem, and solution.
• Ask students to brainstorm other options that Peter could have considered and to discuss how they would solve his problem. Encourage students to compare the choice Peter made to other options.

Session Two: <em>The Trip</em>

• Review The Trip yourself before the session begins. In the story, Louie's family has moved and he misses his friends. His solution is to create his old neighborhood in a shoe box and visit his friends with his imagination.
• Review the book A Letter to Amy , and discuss the Story Map Organizer the class created for the story.
• Picture-walk The Trip . Have students look at the illustrations and compare them to those in A Letter to Amy . Invite students to make predictions about the problem that is explored in the book, based on the pictures.
• What is Louie's problem?
• What is his solution?
• How are the problems similar?
• How are they different?
• What other solutions might you have tried?
• Next, introduce the Problem and Solution Bulletin Board .
• Model how to go to the bulletin board and pick a problem to solve. Show students how to get blank paper and write a possible solution.
• Encourage students to brainstorm possible solutions to one of the problem, and use this conversation as a springboard to discussing how there is more than one way to solve a problem.
• Explain that students may write solutions and add them to the bulletin board in their free time.
• Invite students to create and add their own problems to add to students' ownership of the bulletin board.

Session Three: <em>Pet Show</em>

• Review Pet Show yourself before the session begins. In the story, Archie can't find his cat for the Pet Show, so he brings a germ to the Pet Show.
• Review the Story Map Organizers created for A Letter to Amy and The Trip . Discuss the problems and solutions in these stories.
• Picture-walk Pet Show . Ask students how the illustrations in Pet Show are different from the previous two books.
• Invite students to predict the problem that will be explained in this book.
• Who are the characters?
• Do you recognize any of them?
• What is Archie's problem?
• What would you bring if you couldn't find your pet?
• What other solution might Archie have tried?
• Have students draw what they would bring to the Pet Show on construction paper.
• While students are working on their pictures, share a few solutions students have written from the bulletin board.

Session Four: <em>The Goggles</em>

• Review The Goggles yourself before the session begins. In the story, Archie and Peter are being picked on by older kids. To solve the problem, Archie and Peter trick the older kids and get away.
• Review the Story Map Organizers created for A Letter to Amy , The Trip , and Pet Show . Discuss the problems and solutions in these stories.
• Do you like the illustrations? Why or why not?
• What do you predict the problem might be in this book?
• What is Archie and Peter's problem?
• What is their solution?
• Discuss what students could do if a bully picked on them.
• Make a word web of the solutions.
• Have students write a paragraph about a time when they were picked on or bullied and to explain how they solved the problem. Invite volunteers to share their stories with the class.
• Share a few more solutions students have written from the bulletin board.

Session Five: <em>Jennie's Hat</em>

• Review Jennie's Hat yourself before the session begins. In the story, Jennie's aunt sends her a hat but it is very plain. Jennie's friends help her solve the problem by making the hat unique.
• Review the Story Map Organizers created for A Letter to Amy , The Trip , Pet Show , and The Goggles . Discuss the problems and solutions in these stories.
• What can you tell about the story from the illustrations?
• What do you think the problem may be in this book?
• What is Jennie's problem?
• What is her solution?
• Create a story map for Jennie's Hat using the Story Map interactive as a class. Since students will use this tool on their own in the next session, discuss the way that the tool works as well as the information that you are adding in response to the questions it asks.
• Compare the Story Map Organizers the class made for Jennie's Hat to those made for A Letter to Amy , The Trip , Pet Show , and The Goggles . Ask students to describe how the books' characters are alike and different.

Session Six: Other Ezra Jack Keats Books

• Share the other Ezra Jack Keats books with students. Some favorites include Peter's Chair , Whistle for Willie , The Snowy Day , Apt. 3 , Dreams , Louie , Louie's Search , and Hi, Cat! These are books that have a problem and solution, but vary in reading levels. Preview and decide which books are best for your class.
• Have students pick a book they'd like to read.
• Arrange students in groups of three or four based upon their choices.
• Have groups of students read their selected books and complete a Story Map Organizer as a group. If you prefer, students can create story maps using the Story Map interactive.
• Have students share their finished story maps with the class. Encourage students to make comparisons to the other Keats books that the class has read.

Sessions Seven and Eight: Write Your Own

• Brainstorm a possible problem and solution with the class, or choose one from the bulletin board.
• Model how to create a story using this problem and solution. You can use Jack Ezra Keats' characters or make up names for story characters.
• Write this information on a story map and explain that this is an outline for a story you could write.
• Model how to add details and create a short story.
• Invite students to come up with characters and a problem and solution. Then, as a class, write a story map and then a short story.
• Pass out the Problem Solution handout, and ask students to create their own story maps by writing the problem and solution. Ask students to draw pictures depicting the problem and solution. Students can also use the ReadWriteThink Story Map interactive.
• If students need more support to get started, write examples of problems and solutions on the board for them to choose among.
• Have students write their stories on paper and add illustrations.
• Add the books to the class library after students have had the chance to share their stories with one another.
• Write a letter to the class explaining a problem you have. As a class, write a response explaining a solution that may work. Alternately, students can write their own letters using the ReadWriteThink Letter Generator . You might try this activity after reading A Letter to Amy .
• In The Trip , Louie makes a whole neighborhood out of paper cut in the shapes of buildings. The class can create a neighborhood mural. Each student can cut a different color of construction paper into a building or shape. Attach the students' paper to a large piece of paper to create a whole neighborhood.
• Draw a map showing Archie and Peter's escape from the bullies in The Goggles .
• Act out problems and solutions from the bulletin board.
• After reading the books, show students the movie The Snowy Day and More Ezra Jack Keats Stories , which includes The Snowy Day , Whistle for Willie , Peter's Chair , and Pet Show .
• The ReadWriteThink calendar entry for Ezra Jack Keats' Birthday offers additional resources for studying the author.

Student Assessment / Reflections

• Monitor student participation in classroom discussions. Are students able to make predictions about the story during the picture walks? How well do students understand the problem and solution presented in each story?
• Monitor student participation on the Problem and Solution Bulletin Board . Does each student make a contribution to the bulletin board? Do students offer reasonable solutions for given problems?
• Monitor student understanding of problem and solution during completion of story maps in groups. How well do students work in groups to complete a problem/solution story map? Do students offer meaningful contributions to their group work? Do they understand the problems and solutions depicted in their groups’ selected stories? Do students contribute as their groups present their story maps?
• Monitor student understanding of problem and solution during the writing of own story maps and stories. Are students able to plan and write a story with an appropriate solution to a problem?
• Calendar Activities
• Student Interactives

Students read and discuss an award-winning book before writing their own story that demonstrates compassion.

The Story Map interactive is designed to assist students in prewriting and postreading activities by focusing on the key elements of character, setting, conflict, and resolution.

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A Story of Creative Problem Solving

Creative Problem Solving (CPS) is the grandaddy of problem solving methodologies.

Sometimes the best way to show something is to tell a story. So here is an oldie but goodie . It has been adapted countless times, but the essence remains the same:

A Russian businessman walks into a Swiss bank in Geneva and asks for a $100 loan. He offers his luxury Mercedes car as collateral. The collateral is too good, and the bank manager approves the loan. A year later, the Russian comes back. He repays the loan and the 10% interest and is ready to collect his car. Finally, the puzzled bank manager dares to ask him: “Excuse me, sir, could you tell me: did you really need that $100 so badly? In order to get the money, you left your luxury car with us for a whole year!” The Russian replied, “That’s simple – just think outside the box: where else in Geneva can I find such a great parking place for just $10 a year?”’

Let’s make this a case study. Through the lens of CPS, what did the businessman do to arrive at his course of action?

1) Objective finding: Identify a goal, wish or challenge.

The businessman was bothered by the high price of storing his car and wanted to do something about it.

2) Fact finding: Gather significant information to enable a clear understanding of the objective.

The businessman did some research about ways of safely storing his car.

3) Problem finding: Sharpen awareness of the problem and create a crisp complete problem statement or statements that invite solutions.

After his research, the businessman determined that traditional means like street parking or parking garages were either unsafe or very expensive.

4) Idea finding: Generate potential ideas to address the problem statement.

Next, the businessman generated a list of ideas without worrying about how good they were. He simply wanted the biggest number of ideas he could come up with, even if they sounded absurd at first. Once he had a big list, he determined which ideas had the potential to realistically work.

5) Solution finding: Select and strengthen solutions by identifying important criteria to evaluate potential solutions against for best fit.

The businessman had certain criteria. He likely wanted his car to be safe, the solution to be legal, and to pay as little as possible. Taking his refined list, he matched each idea to see how it met his criteria, resulting in his bank-loan parking solution.

6) Acceptance finding: Identify resources and actions to support implementation of the selected solutions.

In this instance, the the businessman had all the resources he needed to make the action of getting the bank loan. And what a good action it was. Where else in a big city could you safely park your car for $10 a year?

As this story illustrates, even though CPS is a standardised method of coming up with great solutions, it is also very intuitive and straight-forward to perform. And, perhaps that is the key to it’s success. Like any great invention, it is the effective simplicity that makes CPS the time-tested methodology we continue to use today .

Jonathan Bannister

Founder and Director of Strategy - Ex of Leo Burnett, Jonathan has a long history of successful communications planning on accounts such as Procter & Gamble and Financial Times. Jonathan leads strategic planning at Make Happy and brings his wealth of experience to find the right strategy for our clients.

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Creative problem solving: Can you train people to think better?

By Blair Miller

Topics: Creativity , Problem Solving

Ever wonder what Apple designers, R&D researchers, Tesla engineers and Broadway directors have in common?

Creative thinking. But creative thinking doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. It is the outgrowth of an intuitive process of problem solving , that, when made explicit, unleashes the possibility for deliberate creative collaboration.

Creative problem solving (CPS) is the world’s most widely researched and disseminated model of creative thinking. The process reflects the natural way human beings approach and solve complex problems. It was first articulated by Alex Osborn in the 1930s and popularized in the 1950s with his book Applied Imagination. Over the past 60 years, it has become the universal creative process for complex problem solving, used as the foundation of many “proprietary” processes practiced agencies and corporations around the world.

More ideas surface and more new ideas are brought forward.

The heartbeat of creative problem solving is the separation of two distinct modes of thinking—diverging and converging. Diverging calls for the proliferation of possibilities, perspectives, and options. Converging requires the judicial selection of just a few. Think of a funnel: diverging is the wide mouth that collects from a broad range, and converging is the narrow spout that focuses the flow.

The advantage of separating these two modes? More ideas surface and more new ideas are brought forward.Creative problem solving is an open-source creative thinking model with diverging and converging built into each step. It offers a shared language and tools that support collaboration in groups and across organizations. Today, it serves many teams, organizations and fortune 500 companies as the core method for problem solving, cost optimization, and new product development. Some examples of organizations putting creative problem solving to use:

• A large packaged goods manufacturer reducedtheir product packaging and saved over $1 million inmaterials and transportation.
• After creative problem solving training, a sustainable agricultural company increased its patent disclosures by 50% in 2 years.
• A major new line at a synthetic fertilizer manufacturer was under performing. A special team was assigned to use the CPS process. Within two days they optimized the line resulting in an increase in revenue of $40,000 per shift.
• A cadre of CPS trainers at a major food and beverage company collected the ideas of 300 employees at a one-day forum and delivered millions of dollars in savings within one year.

The 4 basic steps of CPS, as articulated in the FourSight model include clarifying, ideating, developing and implementing.

Clarifying actually has three components:

• Identifying the goal, wish or challenge,
• Assessing the situation by becoming sensitive to context, information, trends, insights and research,
• Framing the challenge to produce thinking that achieves the desired future state.

Ideating is the part of creative problem solving that most people know. It’s the classic idea generation of new ideas or “brainstorming,” (actually a term coined by Alex Osborn—though he would be dismayed at how it’s often practiced today). Of all the phases in CPS, ideating has the biggest toolbox and repertoire of creative thinking techniques. The primary output of this stage is a robust set of original ideas aimed at solving the creative challenge at hand.

Developing takes the initial solution set, produced during ideating, and fashions them into viable solutions. Often this involves examining the specific strengths and weaknesses of a potential solution through deliberate criteria and iteratively refining and elaborating the initial solution set. This is where prototypes come in, as a way to create low-risk experiments to improve solutions.

Leaders use CPS to tackle complex challenges and ill-defined opportunities.

Implementing

The last logical step is implementation . That is concerned with exploring issues of acceptance and action related to the solution. The output of implementation is a successful introduction of the final product. Study of the CPS process allows everyone to share the same language and tools for collaboration and innovation. Mastery of the CPS process allows a select cadre of trained facilitators to draw out the best thinking of groups. Leadership schooled in the CPS process can“lead forward” into complex challenges and ill-defined opportunities.

Creativity promotes productivity

In the KEYS creative climate survey, all seven of the ‘stimulants’ to creativity correlate positively with productivity. The two ‘obstacles’ to creativity have an inverse correlation with productivity. -- Center for Creative Leadership, User Guide to Keys: Assessing the climate for creativity

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Episode 84: Storytelling For Problem Solving

A conversation with denise withers, founder and story coach at denise withers..

“I firmly believe that culture is essentially just a collection of stories that define how we think and how we behave. In a very simple organizational example, if you’re sitting in a meeting and somebody speaks up to question what their boss says and their boss tells them to shut up, that’s a story that everybody’s going to remember, everybody’s going to file away in their own story database and that story is going to define the way they behave and it’s going to influence whether or not they decide to speak up the next time in a meeting. And so you can come up with all the nice sayings that you want about how your organization works, but it’s the stories that we tell each other, it’s the stories that we see, it’s the stories that we experience that we actually internalize and remember and use to guide our decisions and our behaviors going forward.” – Denise Withers

In this episode of Control the Room, I had the pleasure of speaking with Denise Withers about her journey becoming a Story Coach and helping leaders drive change.  She shares the importance of developing your Narrative Intelligence to improve our abilities to learn, solve problems, and make sense of the world.  We then discuss stories’ influence on culture, change initiatives, and leadership development.  Listen in to learn more about why we need to think beyond just telling stories and start noticing the problem the story is solving.  

Show Highlights

[2:10] How Denise Got Her Start As A Story Coach

[9:30] How To Use Story To Learn, Solve Problems, And Make Sense Of The World. 

[16:20] How To Use Story In Change Initiatives.

[30:00] How To Use Backcasting To Free Up Resources.

[39:00] Helping People Think Beyond Just Telling Stories

Links | Resources

Denise on Twitter

Denise on LinkedIn

About the Guest

Denise Withers has spent the last 30+ years helping leaders use stories to drive change, through her work as an award-winning filmmaker and certified coach. Working with clients across sectors, she’s inspired millions of people to take action on issues like climate change, clean energy, and equity, through channels from Discovery to the UN. 

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Full Transcript

Douglas:  Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting. Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime, you can join our weekly Control the Room Facilitation Lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real-time with other facilitators. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab.

If you’d like to learn more about my new book, Magical Meetings, you can download the Magical Meetings Quick Start Guide, a free PDF reference with some of the most important pieces of advice from the book. Download a copy today at voltagecontrol.com/magical-meetings-quick-guide. Today I’m with Denise Withers, story coach for the planet. Denise helps leaders use stories to solve tough problems and create narrative change. She’s also the author of the book Story Design: The Creative Way to Innovate, and the host of the podcast Forward: How stories drive change. Welcome to the show, Denise.

Denise:  Thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited about our conversation.

Douglas:  I am excited as well. I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. Picked up the book. Gosh, it’s been a while. I think we first spoke, it’s been months now and we’re finally here doing the recording, so really looking forward to digging in. So far my conversations with you have been really, I would say, inspiring. I know we’ll probably go even deeper now, so really looking forward to it.

Denise:  Yeah, that’s great. There’s so much you can do with stories. We could talk for hours.

Douglas:  Absolutely. I guess before we get into kind of more current events, I’d love to hear how you got your start in the work of story design.

Denise:  Yeah. I guess I started back in the ’80s. I studied radio and television arts and I ended up becoming a documentary filmmaker for about 20 years. I was really lucky in my career that I launched my career just a little bit before all the specialty cable channels started out in Canada, if anybody remembers cable, and Discovery Channel had just gone on the air. So they were really hungry for content. So I was quite lucky to be able to get hired by a lot of the different shows on Discovery Channel and spent 20 years doing documentaries on everything from life and space to endangered species, to topics like HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa. It was literally, it really was the best job in the world. I was traveling around the world, learning all kinds of new things and really helping leaders and organizations spread the word about the good work they were doing and make a change.

It all kind of came crashing to a halt around 2001, 2002 when reality TV took off. That just changed the business model for television and they weren’t really interested in documentaries anymore. So I tried reality TV for a year or so and I really just couldn’t do it. I literally woke up one morning and said, “This is no way for a grown-up to make a living,” and I walked away from TV. I ended up going to grad school, a new program here in British Columbia, Canada, focused on interactive arts and technology. This was when digital media was really starting to take off. I thought it was going to look at how we use different kinds of media, video versus audio, for different kinds of learning, because I really loved the learning part of the work that I’d been doing.

But what I discovered was at the time, nobody was talking about this thing called engagement that was second nature for us in television. If you didn’t make your program engaging, people would change the channel and the show would get terrible ratings and you’d be out of a job. So I ended up doing a Master of Science on what engagement is, how it works. So looking at the cognitive science behind it, the behavioral science, the developmental psychology, and then really exploring how do you put that all together? Are there ways that you can actually design media or design experiences to be more engaging? I ended up developing a set of guidelines for how you do that.

Ironically, it turned out that the most powerful tool we have for engagement is story. And so as part of that research, I started exploring this concept of narrative intelligence. I also was exposed to the idea of design, which now it’s really popular this idea of design thinking in business as a problem solving framework. That’s when it really all came together for me. I realized that what I’d been doing during my documentary work was really this thing called story design where you have basically a communications problem or an education problem that you need to solve and you design a story to solve that problem. The process I was using as a creative was very similar to the process that organizations and businesses and entrepreneurs are using in design thinking.

When I graduated, I ended up doing quite a lot of work in the post-secondary world because that’s where design thinking was really starting to take off. I spent the next few years really weaving together all of these tools. So everything from storytelling, design thinking, strategic foresight, appreciative inquiry, behavioral economics. Starting to bring all those things together to say, how can we change the way that we design solutions to problems? So how can we change our approach to change? That’s really what I’ve been doing for the last 15 years. So really it’s led into this movement to go beyond just using stories as a way to influence people and as a framework for communication to using stories as a way to learn and solve problems and make change.

Douglas:  That’s an amazing story in itself. I think maybe the one thing that blows my mind the most is the epiphany that reality TV is really the thing you can point to as the reason why the television documentary really took a dive. From my personal experience, I remember it but I can’t say that I pointed to that one cause, but it makes so much sense in retrospect.

Denise:  Yeah, it was quite clear reality TV appealed to the demographic that the advertisers wanted whereas documentaries appealed to an older demographic. The younger demographic spends more money. Anybody who thinks that the networks care about content is fooling themselves. The networks are in the business to make money. So if they could produce reality TV cheaper and get the demographic that the advertisers wanted, then they were going to be all over that. So yeah, we really got kicked to the curb quite quickly.

Douglas:  And it’s not surprising that you didn’t find much passion in the reality TV space because it’s really a void of many stories.

Denise:  Well, yeah, I would argue that. I mean, I’ve got one of my best friends is an editor on Survivor and she’s the best storyteller I know. She is a master at taking all of the stuff that’s filmed in the course of an episode of Survivor, which doesn’t have a story to it, it’s just a whole bunch of stuff that happened. Her expertise is in taking all of that and finding a compelling story to tell. So I wouldn’t say that it doesn’t have a story but there’s no room for a writer-director, which is what I was in the classical sense in that genre.

Douglas:  That is fascinating the point that the story’s almost fabricated from all these threads that were kind of collected versus documentary style’s more around like showcasing the story that’s kind of already there.

Denise:  Yes. And in fact, it’s actually a great metaphor. The work that she’s doing on Survivor is actually a great metaphor for what our narrative intelligence does. So narrative intelligence is really our natural ability to learn and solve problems from stories. When you think about intelligence, emotional intelligence, or linguistic intelligence, intelligence is all about the ability to analyze patterns in a specific domain like math or language, or sports and learn and solve problems from those patterns.

And so when you think about the way that our brain works, we get bombarded with random bits of information all the time and what our brain does, what our narrative intelligence does is it organizes all those bits of information into the pattern of a story with a problem, a quest for answers and a solution. And then it packages that and that’s how we make sense of the world. Everything that happens to us, that’s actually how we make sense of it. And so as an editor on Survivor, she’s doing the same thing. She’s taking all these random bits of information and she’s organizing them into a story so we can make sense of what’s happening in that situation.

Douglas:  It also reminds me, when you’re talking about these patterns that we’re basically identifying and applying these models of the world that we know about or that we’ve learned, it reminds me of our pre-show chat and how you were talking about how cultures contain stories and being a part of culture means that you kind of are part of these stories or you identify with these stories and they can influence the way you see the world. It seems fairly similar these kinds of cultural stories or these stories that are aligned with the cultures and these patterns and models that we pick up through disciplines as well.

Denise:  Yeah, absolutely. I firmly believe that culture is essentially just a collection of stories that define how we think and how we behave. In a very simple organizational example, if you’re sitting in a meeting and somebody speaks up to question what their boss says and their boss tells them to shut up, that’s a story that everybody’s going to remember, everybody’s going to file away in their own story database and that story is going to define the way they behave and it’s going to influence whether or not they decide to speak up the next time in a meeting. And so you can come up with all the nice sayings that you want about how your organization works, but it’s the stories that we tell each other, it’s the stories that we see, it’s the stories that we experience that we actually internalize and remember and use to guide our decisions and our behaviors going forward.

Douglas:  As you were saying that, something really just emerged for me. Then you reinforce it further with these words like internalized and remember, stories can be a memory device. People talk about like memory palace planting these things that we want to remember in these visual kinds of spaces in our mind. But also stories can be a way of remembering things, the way we tell a story and the way we repeat that story. I know my mom has these stories about me being a seven-year-old that she likes to tell over and over and over again and it’s a way of remembering. Those are the things that you don’t forget because you kind of internalize them and you tell them.

Denise:   Yeah, absolutely. Again, my working hypothesis is that we keep absolutely everything we know about the world in packets of stories in our own personal story database. And so that’s how we remember everything. And so the implications of that are actually huge because that means that stories are actually the source of all of our knowledge, our creativity, and our innovation. And then the piece that goes along with that, what we’re seeing, the neuroscience of stories is coming a long way because we’re getting all these advances in medical imaging and that kind of thing. What we’re learning is that the more often you tell a story, whether you tell it aloud or you tell it to yourself, the more deeply sort of “wired” or rooted it gets. That’s one reason why it’s so hard to make change.

When somebody starts a change initiative, whether it’s within an organization or it’s personal, I’m going to run five miles every day, or it’s social, we’re going to get everybody to switch over to electric cars, typically what we do is we think that we’re starting with a blank slate. We just look ahead to the future and we say, “This is the story that I’m going to create. I’m going to be a runner. I’m going to be an electric car owner.” What we forget is that people are already telling themselves stories about that situation. We’re not starting with a blank slate. And those stories are typically very deeply ingrained. And so the only way that you are going to get them to change their behavior is to replace the story that they’re telling themselves with one that they like better, one that shows them the path to a better future.

This is why we’re failing to get people to take action on things like climate change because the stories that we’re telling are all stories of sacrifice and loss. They’re not better stories. They don’t offer us a better future. So we’re not going to give up our old stories about I like my car, I like my warm house, I like my 30-minute shower. We have to reframe the way we try to change the climate narrative. We have to figure out what people actually really want more of and then design the solutions. This is where it gets into change design, design the solutions that they actually really want and will adopt. They’re not going to do it just because it’s the right thing to do.

Douglas:  It reminds me too of some research that I’ve seen around resistance to change and how it’s tied into identity. Identity is just stories that we’re telling ourselves about who we are and who we believe we will be in the future. And if this change is coming along that makes us think that we’re not going to be the same way or be that same person that we always knew to be or always wanted to be, that can be really hard for folks and if they’re not willing to change that story or see how it might unfold differently or if we don’t confront that, then it’s going to be really difficult to actually see the actual change through.

Denise:  Yeah, absolutely. When you think about it, a lot of the work that I do is one-to-one coaching. So narrative coaching at an individual level for change makers and for leaders. That’s exactly it, who are you now and who’s the person that you want to be, and what’s the journey that you need to undergo to become that person, and identity is a really strong part of that. It’s really fascinating to me to see, once people start to step into a new identity, change happens really fast.

Quite often, we see this a lot in coaching, if somebody says, “I want to be the CEO, I want to be the CEO.” You say, “Okay, well, what’s stopping you from being the CEO right now?” And they list 10 things that they think are stopping them from being a CEO right now. In reality, those are just stories that they’re telling themselves. They could actually start to be a CEO of their own company right now. There’s very few actual, real barriers. The biggest barriers, as you say, are the way that they see themselves right now. They tell themselves they have to do all of these things before they can be somebody different when the fact is you can actually start to be somebody different right now.

Douglas:  I love that. I think in one of our earlier chats, I wrote down this notion of be the person you want to be. And so reframing the story, you’re giving yourself permission to do it.

Denise:  Absolutely. That’s a really nice way to put it. You give yourself permission to do it. And again, we don’t realize that the stories we tell ourselves are typically our biggest barriers. They’re the things that hold us back.

Douglas:  I also remember you saying that in your one-to-one coaching that you craft a change story with them. It sounds like that’s what you were describing here with this kind of workaround what is it that they want to do and how they reshape that. So I guess I’m curious how that looks when someone’s crafting the story. What does that entail?

Denise:  Yeah. A change story is really, it brings together several different forms of stories that people call different things. So it’s a leadership story, it’s a future story, it’s a pitch story, and it’s based on kind of everything I’ve learned over the last five to 10 years. What I’m realizing is we hear a lot about you need to tell your story, you need to tell your story. That work is often focused on telling the story of what you’ve done in the past. What we’re actually seeing is that people are more drawn to the story of where you’re going. If you want to lead change, you need to be able to tell people the story of where you’re leading them, why it matters and how it’s going to make their life better. And within that, you do need to absolutely include why you’re the right person to be able to do it, which includes some of what you’ve achieved in the past.

But people are less interested in what you’ve done in the past and more interested in where you’re going in the future. So what I ended up doing was looking at different story models and putting together my own story structure that I call this change story. And so it really, I think there’s eight steps to it. One of the things it does to it, it also tries to weave you through the emotional flow of the journey where you have highs and lows. So you start out with there’s a problem. You’re struggling, whatever it is that you’re struggling with, but things don’t have to be this way. And then it moves right into the vision. Just imagine how much better life could be instead of where you are with your struggling.

So what’s stopping you, and then you get into obstacles. You’re being held back by limiting stories that you’re telling yourself about what is and is impossible. And then that’s where you really come in with your solution, which in classical storytelling is the magic gift. So you have the power to change whatever it is that’s stopping you with this magic gift and be able to make your future reality. And then this is where more of the pitch piece comes in. You remind people that it can be scary to make change. Making change like this can be scary. How do you know you can do it?

And then you move into courage or strengths, which is, if it’s individual coaching, well, you’ve done it before and you look at examples of how you’ve done it before. Or if you’re trying to get somebody to follow you, well, the reason we know we can do it is because here’s all the things that I’ve done before as a leader. And then you wrap up with reminding them of the urgency, why they need to take action now, really how crappy their life is right now and how much better it could be if they would just make this one change. And then you end with a call to action.

I love it. It has some parallels to some of the stuff from Nancy Duarte around the way the world is and the way the world could be as far as really good framing for presentations, but it’s so much more personally actionable.

Denise:  Yeah. It absolutely includes, Nancy Duarte came up with that framework by analyzing some of the most powerful speeches of our time like Martin Luther King. One of the speeches that I love is JFK talking about going to the moon. It’s an example that I use quite a lot when I’m trying to help people under the power of vision. In his speech, he rallies people by saying Russia’s kicking our butt and if we can be the first ones to the moon, I guarantee that we’re going to become the technological leaders of the world. And so he sets this great challenge, we’re going to win the race to the moon. He has no freaking idea how they’re going to win the race but he tells the story to inspire a nation to go out and do it.

He didn’t spend 10 years figuring out the solution to the problem and then come and tell the story. He started with the story of this is what we’re going to do and galvanized a nation to get there. That’s the power of bringing story right up to the beginning of your change design cycle. You don’t leave it until the end when you want to just communicate, you bring it right up to the front. And so the work that I’m doing now with organizational clients is we are using this change story framework to design the change initiative itself, to design the change strategy itself. And so what happens is once you finish your strategy, you’ve also got your story that’s ready to go to bring other people along with you.

Douglas:  Well, that makes so much sense because it reminds me of how a lot of companies, they hear about OKRs and they think, “Oh, wow, that’s going to be a silver bullet for us. We’ll adopt OKRs and we’ll have a really straightforward strategy and it’ll be aligned and we’ll be so much more successful.” And as Christina Wodtke so eloquently points out, OKRs are a strategy deployment vehicle, they’re not a strategy definition vehicle. And so while the stories can be really powerful, if there is no vision, if there’s no dream to anchor it, then it’s not going to be nearly as galvanizing. So it makes sense that you would start there and bring your clients to a point where they have that focal point to rally everyone around.

Denise:  Yeah. The most important piece of this is that you develop the change story with the people that you’re trying to get to change. I’m just going to come back to climate because that’s where I’m doing a lot of my work right now. The vision that we’ve been trying to sell is this vision of a green future where everybody’s driving electric cars. And again, that in itself is not compelling. And so what we did, I’m working with the municipality here in Canada right now, we actually went out and we did story research. So we collected stories from the people that we want to change to find out, what do they want more of in their life? What’s holding them back? What are they really struggling with? Then we use that to craft a vision that they really want that also gets us to zero emissions.

So the things that they’re struggling with like they want to… This is a suburban community, so they want to stop commuting. Nobody wants to spend four hours a day in their car. They want more time with their families. They want to save money. They want to be able to spend more time in nature. So how do we craft a climate solution that creates that vision for them, that makes that their reality, and also reduces their emissions? Now that’s something they’re going to get behind. They’re not going to support it because it reduces emissions, they’re going to support it because it gives them the life they want.

Douglas:  That’s amazing. It shows that tie back to the design thinking or just the kind of understanding the problem that we’re solving before we even begin to think about the approach.

Denise:  Yeah. I think this is where the storytelling community, professional storytelling community has really kind of done itself a disservice because over the last 20 years or probably longer, stories have been positioned as this magical tool to convince people, to influence people, to sell them on ideas. What that’s made people think about it, I can have a crappy idea but if I have a great story, people will buy it anyway. What I’m saying is, especially when we start to talk about social and environmental change, that’s not working. We have to stop trying to sell crappy ideas. This is where the design thinking piece comes back in. We actually have to use stories to design better solutions, and then you don’t need the really slick million-dollar story to sell it because it’s a good solution and it will sell itself.

Douglas:  So how does strategic foresight come into the work you do? You mentioned that earlier. I’m a big fan and think it’s super cool and not enough people are doing it. I’m just kind of curious how it actually shows up in the work that you’re doing around maybe climate.

Denise:  Yeah. It shows up. Well, again, if you look at this change story, it shows up in two spots there. It shows up in the vision piece. Well, it shows up in the problems too. The problem, the vision, and the solution. So looking at trends, what are the trends that we’re faced with? How can they inform the solution that we develop? How can they inform the vision of the future? And how can they help us better understand the problem that our audience is struggling with? Not a climate example but a healthcare example, I was working with an organization that served a large south Asian population and we were trying to look ahead to say how are we going to change our care model so that we can engage this population better because it was a really big gap between the needs of the population and the care that was being provided.

So I actually ran kind of a future workshop for them where I brought in all the trends that we were starting to look at and I created several scenarios for them about possible futures for this region of the province that I live in. So the solutions included things like what happens if there’s an earthquake? What happens if we have all autonomous vehicles because a big part of the population drive for a living? What happens if the way that we all live changes where we’re not living in multi-generational houses and things like that? It was fascinating for me to bring in everybody that included urban planners and to see the shock on their faces when they started to think about the fact that the future, even just a few years down the road, is going to be different than it is right now.

We were able to bring in those trends. I look a lot of the World Economic Forum. They have great data available on what’s going on in trends, but we have a really hard time envisioning the future. We typically think of the future as looking exactly like today. And so I find that strategic foresight, bringing in the trends, helping clients play around with those trends and connect them to what they’re seeing in their own lives is a really nice way to get them to start to break free of the past and the current situation that they’re in and really let loose to imagine a better future.

Douglas:  Super cool. I’m curious to come back to the model here that you have, which is the Story Specs and the story being comprised of the problem, the quest, and the resolution. I’m curious when you are helping people craft stories about their future, how does resolution show up in a story about the future?

Denise:  Yeah, that’s interesting. That Story Specs model is, it’s really a simplified version of the hero’s journey because I find the hero’s journey is just way too complex for anybody, including me, to work with. So it really boils down to, it’s really story kind of boiled down. Typically if you’re talking about a story in the past, when you start to try to capture or understand the story, you do it in a linear way. So you start with, what was the problem you were trying to solve? What were all the things that you tried to do to solve that problem, so what was your quest, and how did the story end? And typically stories really only end in one of three ways; you succeed, you fail or you die trying.

The difference though is when you’re starting to think about a future story, you actually start with the end and then reverse engineer from there. So it is a different approach from a design perspective in working with clients. And quite often, even though in design thinking you often start it with what’s the problem that we have to solve, I find more and more these days I’m actually starting with, well, what’s the vision? What’s happily ever after? Where do we want to actually end up, and then how do we reverse engineer from there?

Douglas:  Interesting. And I’m curious, once you do that, do folks then take a more kind of explorative approach to thinking about how they decompose the pieces that get them on that journey?

Denise:  Yeah. I don’t know if it’s a more explorative approach but I do find it frees them up. One of the truths of design thinking for me has always been problem definition is absolutely the hardest part. And by starting with the future, you’re kind of shifting the problem a little bit and moving it into the future. But once you get clear on what it is you really want, like you get really crystal clear, a vision of where you want to go, figuring out how to get there really isn’t that hard. Like that’s never been the thing that stopped us. Typically what stops us is that we’re trying to solve the wrong problem or we don’t really know what we’re trying to create, why it matters. And so that’s the bulk of the work that I end up doing is really trying to clarify those things. It’s that Einstein quote. What is it? If I had an hour to save the world, I’d spend the first 59 minutes trying to figure out what the problem is.

Douglas:  Yeah. Figure out all the right questions to ask. It’s like so good. Yeah, I love that. I think you’re so right. The problem is often so misunderstood or people struggle how to articulate it. And so moving into that visionary piece, especially if it truly is visionary work, if we’re talking about like what’s the next feature or what’s the next market we’re going to go into, maybe an explorative approach where we research and learn and gather might make sense, but I love this backtracking. It’s similar to how you might just take a big project and decide, hey, what’s the deadline for these little pieces? Well, when does it all need to be done, and let’s work our way backwards. It’s like that backwards design piece.

Denise:  Yeah, exactly. Some people call this backcasting, I just reverse engineering. It’s all kind of the same thing for me. But the other reason that I really love it is quite often, again, clients come in and they’ve got this laundry list of things that they have to achieve on their project. Most of the time, 80% of the stuff on their laundry list turns out to be irrelevant. If you start with what you really need to have by the end, it changes the way that you design your solution and a lot of the stuff that’s on that list can quite often fall off. The beauty of that is, it often frees up resources for you to do other things or invest more deeply in the most important areas.

Douglas:  Another note that I wrote down was around because you mentioned the word engagement and I was thinking about connection and how stories create connection and alignment. The JFK story that you told is 100% around alignment and connection like people were focused and galvanized on this common mission. I think that’s super powerful when we think about change efforts inside organizations.

Denise:  Absolutely. You need to have everybody moving in the same direction. There’s a great little anecdote that goes with JFK piece, which is apparently a few years later he was visiting one of the NASA facilities and stopped to talk to a janitor in the hallway and said, “Tell me what you do here.” The janitor looked at him and said, “Well, Mr. President, I’m helping to put the first man on the moon.” You don’t get better alignment than that.

And so, again, the reason I say you want to develop your strategy as a story is it also gives you space to help everybody who needs to be involved in your story figure out what character they are. What role do they have to play? Are they Frodo? Talking about Lord of the Rings, are they Frodo? Are they the hero? Are they Aragorn, a supporter? Are they Gandalf? Are they the wizard? What role do they have to play? People really need that clarity and that understanding and coming back to identity, that sense of belonging. I’m part of this group, I have a really important contribution to make. It’s crystal clear to me why I belong and why this organization needs me.

Douglas:  It’s interesting, unrelated to what you were just telling me but it just jogged a memory of mine of a client that we were working with. Their story that they were telling themselves around this problem and around this project was so heavily laden with their internal jargon and their brand identity that they didn’t really understand the story, because this Brandy word, I’m trying to be vague here, but this Brandy word meant different things to different people, especially as they applied it to the context of this project. And so a lot of the work that we were doing was helping to unpack it and like, wait, hold on, let’s remove the metaphor and let’s remove the fancy marketing shin and just get down to some real words around what we’re talking about. I’m just wondering if that’s ever come up in your work with stories because it seems like the jargon was getting in the way of good storytelling.

Denise:  Yeah. Details always get in the way. And so one of the first things that I do with clients is we build the bullet point story. So if the change story has eight steps to it, there’s like one bullet for each step and you can tell that story in one minute. You have to be able to do that first to get really clear on what matters. And again, that’s where a lot of the stuff that doesn’t matter falls off and frees you up. One of the biggest barriers to change is all the baggage that we bring into it. So if we can drop that baggage as we kind of cross the threshold into the new world and the new identity and the new situation that we want to go into, now we have resources, we have energy, we have mental space to really focus on where we want to go as opposed to where we’ve been and all this stuff that we think is important and really isn’t.

Douglas:  That reminds me of a funny thing a mentor once told me. He said, “Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.” He wasn’t telling me to lie or fib or make stuff up, but I think that my tendency was just to lay the facts on them so much that like, or to be so specific about what it was. He was like, “Is that going to catch people’s emotions and minds and imagination?” Like, give them fuel to be excited about this thing.

Denise:  Yeah. It’s interesting. So my research into engagements back in grad school revealed that actually, the biggest factor in getting and keeping people’s attention was creating like a gap or a challenge for them, basically inviting them into solving a problem, because we’re just wired for that. And so once you invite them to solve a problem, they’re going to stay engaged for as long as that problem remains unsolved. And then as soon as it’s solved, the engagement ends.

Douglas:  Well, that reminds me of Cunningham’s law. Have you heard of this?

Douglas:  How do you learn anything on the internet? You post the wrong answer because everyone wants to tell you you’re wrong. It’s also a great way to get children engaged. If you point at something that’s clearly not an elephant and you say that’s an elephant, then they want to tell you that’s not an elephant, you’re wrong.

Denise:  Right. Yeah.

Douglas:  I guess as we’re kind of nearing an end here, I wanted to just hear from you what your advice would be for someone who’s wanting to get their start. What’s a good first step to start working in this area of story design?

Denise:  Yeah. I think the easiest thing actually is to go out and do some really small, really simple narrative analysis or story collecting and analysis just so you can start to get a sense of how powerful it is. And so you can pick a question or a problem that you’re dealing with and go out and even just talk to three or five people may be outside your regular circle and get them to tell you a story about it. So let’s say you’re trying to get people in your office to recycle more. So you go out and you talk to people outside your office and you ask them to tell you stories about recycling, like how did they get started recycling? What’s the best recycling experience that they’ve ever had? Where have they seen great recycling done?

When you collect stories like that, even just if you get three or four stories, your narrative intelligence is naturally going to start to analyze the patterns in those stories and look for themes and look for commonalities. That’s where you can start to get great ideas that fuel innovation. If you’d only ever do this within your circle, you’re not going to get fresh ideas that way. You’re just going back to culture. You’re just going to reinforce the stories that you’re already telling yourselves. So that’s one way to get started is just go out and collect stories about a specific thing that you’re trying to work on outside of your regular circle and kind of start to learn what other people have to say.

The other thing you can do is next time you’re planning something, whether it’s a strategy or a program or even just a meeting, try actually planning it as a story using that really basic structure of what’s the problem we’re trying to solve? What are two or three that we think we need to do to solve it? And what’s our vision of success, what would happily ever after look like? And then build on that and say, who are the characters that we need to do this with us? What roles would they have to play? What superpowers do we need them to bring in?

And then look at what are some of the potential obstacles? Who are the bad guys that we’re going to have to fight? What are some of the potential barriers that we’re going to have to come up against? I think you’ll find that it’s a great tool for alignment for whoever’s working on the thing that you’re planning. And it’s also going to be a great tool for helping you both be creative and then share your ideas with other people and get them engaged.

Douglas:  Awesome. Sounds like great advice. Let’s kind of bring things to an end here. And as we do, I’d love to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought and maybe share a little bit of information around how they can find your work and the book, et cetera.

Denise:  Yeah. The final thought I think is to really start to think beyond just telling stories and really start to focus on identifying and listening to and analyzing and processing stories. And as you do that, every time you hear a story, try to figure out what the problem in that story is. What’s that person trying to do? What are they trying to achieve? What problem are they trying to solve? That’s really, it’s not just going to beef up your narrative intelligence, it’s also going to make you a much better critical thinker and designer because you’re going to develop your problem definition skills.

So I think looking beyond what the hype is telling us in terms of everybody should be a storyteller, because that just makes us a whole lot of talkers with nobody listening, and really spend some time focusing on developing your listening, your story, listening to your story analysis skills and see what you can learn from that. In terms of where to find me, you can find me across social media. You can find me on my website, which is denisewithers.com, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, kind of all over the place. Most active on LinkedIn I think. And I’ve also got a TED Talk that should be available as of March 2022.

Douglas:  Awesome. And we’ll have links in the show notes so you can just click straight through. Definitely check this stuff out. It’s so good. Denise, it’s been such a pleasure chatting with you. Really, really great stuff.

Denise:  Well, thanks so much. I love talking about this stuff. If anybody has any questions, I really encourage them to reach out. I’m always happy to hear what people are doing. It’s a great learning experience for me to see how people are using their narrative intelligence and their natural ability to learn and solve problems with stories.

Douglas:  Awesome. Thanks again for joining the show.

Denise:  Thank you. Have a great day.

Douglas:  Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. And if you want more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.

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What is creative problem-solving?

Table of Contents

An introduction to creative problem-solving.

Creative problem-solving is an essential skill that goes beyond basic brainstorming . It entails a holistic approach to challenges, melding logical processes with imaginative techniques to conceive innovative solutions. As our world becomes increasingly complex and interconnected, the ability to think creatively and solve problems with fresh perspectives becomes invaluable for individuals, businesses, and communities alike.

Importance of divergent and convergent thinking

At the heart of creative problem-solving lies the balance between divergent and convergent thinking. Divergent thinking encourages free-flowing, unrestricted ideation, leading to a plethora of potential solutions. Convergent thinking, on the other hand, is about narrowing down those options to find the most viable solution. This dual approach ensures both breadth and depth in the problem-solving process.

Emphasis on collaboration and diverse perspectives

No single perspective has a monopoly on insight. Collaborating with individuals from different backgrounds, experiences, and areas of expertise offers a richer tapestry of ideas. Embracing diverse perspectives not only broadens the pool of solutions but also ensures more holistic and well-rounded outcomes.

Nurturing a risk-taking and experimental mindset

The fear of failure can be the most significant barrier to any undertaking. It's essential to foster an environment where risk-taking and experimentation are celebrated. This involves viewing failures not as setbacks but as invaluable learning experiences that pave the way for eventual success.

The role of intuition and lateral thinking

Sometimes, the path to a solution is not linear. Lateral thinking and intuition allow for making connections between seemingly unrelated elements. These 'eureka' moments often lead to breakthrough solutions that conventional methods might overlook.

Stages of the creative problem-solving process

The creative problem-solving process is typically broken down into several stages. Each stage plays a crucial role in understanding, addressing, and resolving challenges in innovative ways.

Clarifying: Understanding the real problem or challenge

Before diving into solutions, one must first understand the problem at its core. This involves asking probing questions, gathering data, and viewing the challenge from various angles. A clear comprehension of the problem ensures that effort and resources are channeled correctly.

Ideating: Generating diverse and multiple solutions

Once the problem is clarified, the focus shifts to generating as many solutions as possible. This stage champions quantity over quality, as the aim is to explore the breadth of possibilities without immediately passing judgment.

Developing: Refining and honing promising solutions

With a list of potential solutions in hand, it's time to refine and develop the most promising ones. This involves evaluating each idea's feasibility, potential impact, and any associated risks, then enhancing or combining solutions to maximize effectiveness.

Implementing: Acting on the best solutions

Once a solution has been honed, it's time to put it into action. This involves planning, allocating resources, and monitoring the results to ensure the solution is effectively addressing the problem.

Techniques for creative problem-solving

Solving complex problems in a fresh way can be a daunting task to start on. Here are a few techniques that can help kickstart the process:

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is a widely-used technique that involves generating as many ideas as possible within a set timeframe. Variants like brainwriting (where ideas are written down rather than spoken) and reverse brainstorming (thinking of ways to cause the problem) can offer fresh perspectives and ensure broader participation.

Mind mapping

Mind mapping is a visual tool that helps structure information, making connections between disparate pieces of data. It is particularly useful in organizing thoughts, visualizing relationships, and ensuring a comprehensive approach to a problem.

SCAMPER technique

SCAMPER stands for Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, and Reverse. This technique prompts individuals to look at existing products, services, or processes in new ways, leading to innovative solutions.

Benefits of creative problem-solving

Creative problem-solving offers numerous benefits, both at the individual and organizational levels. Some of the most prominent advantages include:

Finding novel solutions to old problems

Traditional problems that have resisted conventional solutions often succumb to creative approaches. By looking at challenges from fresh angles and blending different techniques, we can unlock novel solutions previously deemed impossible.

Enhanced adaptability in changing environments

In our rapidly evolving world, the ability to adapt is critical. Creative problem-solving equips individuals and organizations with the agility to pivot and adapt to changing circumstances, ensuring resilience and longevity.

Building collaborative and innovative teams

Teams that embrace creative problem-solving tend to be more collaborative and innovative. They value diversity of thought, are open to experimentation, and are more likely to challenge the status quo, leading to groundbreaking results.

Fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement

Creative problem-solving is not just about finding solutions; it's also about continuous learning and improvement. By encouraging an environment of curiosity and exploration, organizations can ensure that they are always at the cutting edge, ready to tackle future challenges head-on.

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Baer, J., Kaufman, J.C. (2012). Creative Problem Solving (CPS). In: Baer, J., Kaufman, J.C. (eds) Being Creative Inside and Outside the Classroom. Advances in Creativity and Giftedness, vol 2. SensePublishers, Rotterdam. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6091-840-7_4

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12 Best Problem Solving Books to Read

By: Angela Robinson | Updated: June 30, 2023

You found our list of top problem solving books .

Problem solving books are guides that improve critical thinking capability and the ability to resolve issues in the workplace. These works cover topics like bias and logical fallacies, problem prevention, and prioritizing. The purpose of these books is to help workers remain calm under pressure and come up with solutions more quickly.

These guides are similar to decision making books , negotiation books , and conflict resolution books . To improve competency in this area, one can also play problem solving games .

This list includes:

• problem solving books for adults
• creative problem solving books
• business problem solving books
• problem solving books for programmers

Here we go!

List of problem solving books

Here is a list of books to improve problem solving skills in the workplace.

1. Fixed: How to Perfect the Fine Art of Problem Solving by Amy E Herman

Fixed is one of the most useful new books on problem solving. The book calls for problem solvers to look beyond instinctual and obvious answers and provides a framework for more creative thinking. While most folks think about problem solving in terms of logic, reason, and disciplines like math and science, this book shows the role that art and imagination play in the process. Amy Herman consulted on leadership training with Silicon Valley companies and military organizations and brings this expertise into the text to train readers on how to adopt a more innovative critical thinking approach.

Notable Quote: “Working through problems is critical for productivity, profit, and peace. Our problem-solving skills, however, have been short-circuited by our complicated, technology-reliant world.”

Read Fixed .

2. Cracked it!: How to solve big problems and sell solutions like top strategy consultants by Bernard Garrette, Corey Phelps, and Olivier Sibony

Cracked it! is one of the best creative problem solving books. Drawing inspiration from the tactics of consultants, this guide is a practical playbook for approaching business problems. The authors outline a “4S” method– State – Structure – Solve – Sell– to tackle obstacles and get support from stakeholders. While many problem solving books simply focus on how to think through issues, this guide also demonstrates how to gain approval for ideas and get others onboard with the solution. The book explains how to best use these techniques, and presents case studies that show the theories in action. Cracked it! is a handy reference for any professional that faces tough challenges on the regular.

Notable Quote: “If you want to know how a lion hunts, don’t go to a zoo. Go to the jungle.”

Read Cracked it!

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3. Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen by Dan Heath

Upstream takes a proactive approach to problem solving. The book urges readers to not only be responsive to issues, but also try to prevent obstacles from occurring. The guide opens with an exploration of “problem blindness,” and the psychological factors that cause folks to be oblivious to issues, along with a reminder that many problems are more controllable and avoidable than first assumed. The pages that follow outline a series of questions leaders can ask to fine-tune the system and steer clear of major headaches, for instance, “How Will You Unite the Right People?” and “How Will You Avoid Doing Harm?” Upstream is full of real world examples of how minor tweaks achieved major results and allowed organizations to sidestep serious holdups.

Notable Quote: “The postmortem for a problem can be the preamble to a solution.”

Read Upstream .

4. Problem Solving 101: A Simple Book for Smart People by Ken Watanabe

Problem Solving 101 is one of the most fun problem solving books for adults. Written by Ken Watanabe, the guide draws on Japanese philosophy as well as the author’s experience as a consultant at McKinsey to help readers understand and approach problems in productive ways. The pages provide blueprints for problem-solving methods such as logic trees and matrixes, and include scenarios and illustrations that help readers visualize the process more clearly. Problem Solving 101 breaks down the problem solving procedure into the most basic parts and lays out step-by-step instructions for choosing the best action in any situation.

Notable Quote: “When you do take action, every result is an opportunity to reflect and learn valuable lessons. Even if what you take away from your assessment seems to be of small consequence, all of these small improvements taken together make a huge difference in the long term.”

Read Problem Solving 101 .

5. What’s Your Problem?: To Solve Your Toughest Problems, Change the Problems You Solve by Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg

What’s Your Problem? insists that the most important step in the problem solving process is to start by honing in on the correct problem. The root of much frustration and wasted efforts is that professionals often pick the wrong points to focus on. This book teaches readers how to reframe and approach issues from a different perspective. The guide outlines a repeatable three step process “Frame, Reframe, and Move Forward” to ensure that workers prioritize effectively and stay on track to achieve desired results. What’s Your Problem? teaches professionals of all levels how to be less rigid and more results-focused and adopt a more agile approach to fixing issues.

Notable Quote: “The problems we’re trained on in school are often quite different from the ones we encounter in real life.”

Read What’s Your Problem?

6. Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, et al

Sprint is one of the best problem solving books for programmers. The authors are the creators of the five-day-process at Google. This guide describes best practices for conducting sprints and solving problems in limited timeframes. The book provides a day-by-day breakdown of tasks for each day of the workweek, with the final steps being designing a prototype and a plan for implementation. Though this idea originated in the tech world and is most widely used in the software industry, this problem-solving and product design approach can be useful for any position that needs to find fixes in a time crunch.

Notable Quote: “We’ve found that magic happens when we use big whiteboards to solve problems. As humans, our short-term memory is not all that good, but our spatial memory is awesome. A sprint room, plastered with notes, diagrams, printouts, and more, takes advantage of that spatial memory. The room itself becomes a sort of shared brain for the team.”

Read Sprint , and check out this guide to virtual hackathons and this list of product design books .

7. Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Think Like a Rocket Scientist lays out formulas and instructions for thinking more strategically. The guide reveals common problem solving approaches used by rocket scientists when exploring the unknown and testing new technology. The book is split into three sections– launch, accelerate, and achieve– with deep dives into concepts such as moonshot thinking and overcoming failure. The anecdotes revolve around space exploration and rocket science yet the methods can be applied to more commonplace and less complex problems as well. Think Like a Rocket Scientist proves that one does not need to be a genius to be a genius problem solver and lets readers learn tricks from one of the most complex professions on the planet.

Notable Quote: “Critical thinking and creativity don’t come naturally to us. We’re hesitant to think big, reluctant to dance with uncertainty, and afraid of failure. These were necessary during the Paleolithic Period, keeping us safe from poisonous foods and predators. But here in the information age, they’re bugs.”

Read Think Like a Rocket Scientist .

8. Bulletproof Problem Solving: The One Skill That Changes Everything by Charles Conn and Robert McLean

Bulletproof Problem Solving is one of the best business problem solving books. This workbook-style-guide breaks down a “bulletproof” method of problem solving favored by consultants at McKinsey. The authors distill the process into seven simple steps–define the problem, disaggregate, prioritize, workplan, analyze, synthesize, and communicate– and give numerous examples of how to follow this cycle with different dilemmas. The chapters explore each stage in depth and outline the importance and finer points of each phase. The book also provides practical tools for readers to build skills, including an appendix with exercise worksheets.

Notable Quote: “Problem solving doesn’t stop at the point of reaching conclusions from individual analyses. Findings have to be assembled into a logical structure to test validity and then synthesized in a way that convinces others that you have a good solution. Great team processes are also important at this stage.”

Read Bulletproof Problem Solving .

9. Think Like a Programmer: An Introduction to Creative Problem Solving by by V. Anton Spraul

Think Like a Programmer is one of the top problem solving books for programmers. The guide lays out methods for finding and fixing bugs and creating clean, workable code. The text emphasizes that programming is not merely a matter of being competent in the language, but also knowing how to troubleshoot and respond to unexpected occurrences. The chapters present examples of problems and puzzles and work through the answers to help strengthen professional competencies. The book provides an introductory crash course and practical toolkit for beginning coders, with a focus on C++. Yet since the text outlines general theory and approach, the book is also helpful for dealing with other programming languages, or for solving problems in non-tech industries as well. The point of the text is to provide a proper mindset and attitude for reacting to these developments, and the book can be a benefit for folks in any field.

Notable Quote: “Don’t Get Frustrated The final technique isn’t so much a technique, but a maxim: Don’t get frustrated. When you are frustrated, you won’t think as clearly, you won’t work as efficiently, and everything will take longer and seem harder. Even worse, frustration tends to feed on itself, so that what begins as mild irritation ends as outright anger.”

Read Think Like a Programmer .

10. The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup by by Noam Wasserman

The Founder’s Dilemmas lays out the most common problems entrepreneurs face and gives advice on how to avoid or solve these issues. The book tackles topics such as managing relationships, hiring, and rewarding or correcting employees. The chapters outline the mistakes inexperienced leaders often make and offer strategies for handling these tough situations with more smarts and skill. By reading this book, founders can learn from predecessors and avoid making obvious and avoidable errors in judgment. The Founder’s Dilemmas is a problem-solving resource for startup leaders and team members who lack more traditional guidance.

Notable Quote: “Ideas are cheap; execution is dear.”

Read The Founder’s Dilemmas , and check out more entrepreneurial books .

11. The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t by Julia Galef

The Scout Mindset challenges readers to move beyond gut reactions and preconceptions and rethink problems. The book offers instructions for overcoming bias and central beliefs to gather more objective data. Julia Galef encourages readers to act more like scouts than soldiers and gather information without judging to make more informed decisions. The text outlines the common reasons folks jump to conclusions and offers advice on how to avoid incorrect assumptions and conduct level-headed analyses. The Scout Mindset is a call to action for objectivity and an instruction manual for breaking away from unhelpful mental patterns that can lead to poor choices.

Notable Quote: “Discovering you were wrong is an update, not a failure, and your worldview is a living document meant to be revised.”

Read The Scout Mindset .

12. Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann

Super Thinking is a comprehensive resource that explains various mental models for problem solving. The book identifies logical fallacies and shows readers how to avoid these pitfalls. The pages also lay out appropriate strategies, tools, techniques to use in different situations, such as matrices, pointed questions, and philosophies. The point of the guide is to teach readers how to evaluate information and make quick yet accurate judgements. The guide helps readers decide the best approach to use for each circumstance. Though packed with information, the pages also contain images and humor that prevent the material from getting too dry. Super Thinking is the ultimate cheat sheet for thinking rationally and acting with intention.

Notable Quote: “Unfortunately, people often make the mistake of doing way too much work before testing assumptions in the real world.”

Read Super Thinking .

Final Thoughts

Problem solving is one of the most essential skills for modern industry. With the breakneck pace at which the current business world changes, there is no shortage of new developments that professionals must contend with on a daily basis. Operating the same way for years at a time is impossible, and it is almost guaranteed that workers at every level will have issues to unravel at some point in their careers.

Books about problem solving help professionals predict, prevent, and overcome issues and find more viable and sustainable solutions. These guides not only provide skills, but also methods for survival in a highly competitive business landscape. These texts show workers that they are more capable than may first appear and that sometimes, seemingly insurmountable obstacles are beatable with a combination of creativity, teamwork, and proper process.

For more ways to beat the odds, check out this list of books on innovation and this list of books on business strategy .

We also have a list of the best communication books .

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FAQ: Problem solving books

Here are answers to common questions about problem solving books.

What are problem solving books?

Problem solving books are guides that teach critical thinking skills and strategies for resolving issues. The purpose of these works is to help professionals be more creative and strategic in problem solving approaches.

What are some good problem solving books for work?

Some good problem solving books for work include Sprint by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, et al, Upstream by Dan Heath, and Think Like a Rocket Scientist by Ozan Varol.

Author: Angela Robinson

Marketing Coordinator at teambuilding.com. Angela has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and worked as a community manager with Yelp to plan events for businesses.

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Creative Technologies: A Game-Changing Major for an Innovative Future

An avid gamer with diverse interests, Sydney found choosing a college major confining. Then she discovered creative technologies (CRT), a major that allowed her to explore her passions while gaining valuable technical and design skills. Now she’s learned to build hardware, apps and video games. She especially enjoys working on the digital aesthetic and immersive experiences for users. She recently graduated, prepared for the job market thanks to hands-on classroom experiences, student work positions and strong mentoring.

Before college, Sydney loved video games but lacked experience designing technology. Challenged at Berry, she built a game from scratch in a creative computing class. By her senior design course, she created hardware and software for different applications, such as tracking student walking patterns for health awareness and measuring light exposure and building temperatures.

“Creative technologies taught me to always see the light at the end of the tunnel,” says Sydney. “I love the process of problem-solving, and I learned not to give up on a project until it is working well.”

Outside the classroom, she grew skills through jobs in Hackberry Lab, Berry’s makerspace, where she worked as a lab assistant, CRT teaching assistant, content developer, curriculum developer and lab director.

“These jobs defined my college experience as much as my academic pursuits,” says Sydney. “They gave me a toolbox of skills that I never would have imagined I could acquire. Now I’m a confident problem-solver.”

Whether guiding students to learn something new or training lab assistants, mentoring brought joy. “I love helping others reach their lightbulb moment,” Sydney reflects. “It’s equipped me to be a patient, persistent leader. The beauty of the CRT community is no two students are the same. Differences are at the core of innovation here. Whether working on my projects, helping students complete theirs or simply sitting and talking, I never felt alone at Hackberry. Can you tell I loved my job?”

Sydney attributes the lab culture to Zane Cochran, clinical assistant professor of creative technologies — also her mentor, advisor and friend. Beyond lab work, he recommended a study abroad program in Norway where she built a printed-circuit-board activity for elementary students. He also connected Sydney to engineering challenges and a maker camp at Darlington School in Rome, Georgia. There she coached elementary students on building and programming robots, writing code and designing creative solutions for various challenges.

She praises Cochran’s commitment: “I hope that I will impact at least one person the way he impacted me. With his support, I have grown professionally and learned so much about myself and my capabilities. I genuinely hope all college students have an advisor like him.”

For students considering a CRT major, Sydney says, “You just need to be willing to fail, adapt to challenges and remain authentic to yourself and your goals. If you master these, CRT will be an unmatched experience for you, and you will build some incredibly cool things.”

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Best Games That Reward Creative Problem-Solving

• As video game technology advances, puzzles have become more open-ended, allowing for creative solutions and multiple outcomes.
• Games like Portal 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 reward players for thinking creatively and finding unique ways to solve problems.
• Undertale and Scribblenauts Unlimited offer players the freedom to approach puzzles in their own way, showcasing the importance of player choice.

In the early days of video games, puzzles and their solutions were pretty cut and dry. Get from Point A to Point B, and accomplish A, B, and C using a very specific method. There was only one way to beat the game; players just needed to find it. Part of this was due to hardware and scripting limitations. Consoles had such limited memory that there simply wasn't room for more creative solutions.

11 Best Puzzle Games On Steam That Deserve More Attention

But as video games and consoles become more advanced, puzzle-solving in games has become more open-ended. Developers are now usually more than happy to hand players the reins and let them run wild with their creativity. All the pieces are there; players just need to put them together. There are no right or wrong answers, just what works and what doesn't, and for those looking to flex their creative puzzle-solving muscles and get rewarded for doing so , there are plenty of gaming options available.

Peace is Always An Option

Platform(s) PS Vita, Switch, PS4, PC, Xbox One

Released September 15, 2015

Developer(s) Toby Fox

Genre(s) RPG

This 2015 smash hit revolutionized puzzle-solving and story progression in RPG adventure games, being one of the first where players could complete the entire game without killing a single enemy. Instead, they could choose the Pacifist route and befriend NPCs instead (or go from killing a single enemy to all of them in the notorious Genocide route ).

Beyond the multiple endings, Undertale is filled with puzzles to overcome, not all of which have a single solution. Is a dastardly skeleton placing a maze trap before the fallen human? They might be able to solve it, or they can opt to simply walk around it. New dialogue options and story branches open and close based on who the player chooses to spare and how. The reward for creative puzzle-solving is that players get to explore more of this colorful world and iconic characters.

Scribblenauts Unlimited

The noun's the limit.

Platform(s) Wii U, Switch, PS4, PC, iOS, Android, 3DS, Xbox One

Released November 13, 2012

Developer(s) 5th Cell

Genre(s) Puzzle, Sandbox

Scribblenauts proves that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword. No, seriously. The titular heroes in this popular puzzle RPG series use the power of words to solve all their problems. Players can write down a noun and watch it appear in the world. Giving it an adjective results in the object or creature transforming to match its new description. Giving a pig wings will allow it to fly, and manifesting some glue out of the ether will permit players to stick things together. The possibilities are literally endless.

Scribblenauts Unlimited builds on its predecessors with an expansive list of nouns, adjectives, and adverbs that players can use and provides multiple ways to solve each puzzle. The game doesn't care how players accomplish their goals, so long as they clear the level's main objective. The only real limit is the player's imagination (and their vocabulary).

Aperture Science Tests One's Creativity

Platform(s) PS3, Switch, Xbox 360, PC

Released April 18, 2011

Developer(s) Valve

Genre(s) Puzzle, Platformer

The Portal games make no secret that they want to test players' problem-solving abilities. The game's central antagonist, GLaDOS , makes that abundantly clear. In fact, the entire plot is to use those same skills to escape the testing facility once and for all. Each test follows the same simple premise: get to the end of the testing chamber in one piece. How the player does it is up to them - and the game's physics engine. Jump through portals, avoid deadly turrets and bottomless pits, propel through the air -- it doesn't matter. As the saying goes, "If it's stupid and it works, it isn't stupid."

Portal 2 takes this engaging premise and amps it up to eleven. Puzzles are bigger, deadlier, and more complicated than ever before. While some answers are laid out more obviously than others, players are free to ignore those options and think outside the box as much as they want. So long as they reach the final door, GLaDOS doesn't mind how they did it. After all, data is data.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Zonai devices help players reinvent the wheel.

Platform(s) Switch

Released May 12, 2023

Developer(s) Nintendo

Genre(s) Adventure

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was a massive breath of fresh air for the franchise. Linear adventures with clear-cut solutions were swapped out for a massive open world and a fun new physics engine that led to infinitely creative gameplay. Many fans of the series felt the game essentially reinvented the wheel of a franchise that had started to get a bit formulaic. However, its direct sequel, Tears of the Kingdom , didn't just reinvent the wheel; it allowed players to invent their own.

8 Hardest Zelda Games To 100% Complete

On top of the many new mechanics introduced in Breath of the Wild , Tears of the Kingdom introduced several new mechanics for players to tinker around with. The best by far is the introduction of Zonai devices, allowing players to use various moving mechanical parts in endless combinations to solve puzzles. Gamers can build siege engines that breathe fire, gliders powered by fans, or massive catapaults to launch enemies (or themselves) off into the horizon.

Baldur's Gate 3

Any solution is just a dice roll away.

Platform(s) Xbox Series X, PS5, PC, macOS, Stadia

Released August 3, 2023

Developer(s) Larian Studios

This award-winning RPG action-adventure game from 2023 famously adapted the core rules of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition into a video game format. But the game didn't just take the basic stats and mechanics; it went above and beyond to allow players to think just as creatively as they would while playing real D&D . Any D&D campaign can go off the rails at any moment. One bad dice roll or truly chaotic player choice, and there will be consequences. That's what makes the game so fun, and Baldur's Gate 3 understands this.

No two playthroughs of Baldur's Gate 3 are the same, thanks to the infinite array of choices , dice checks, and consequences. Players are rewarded for seeing just how many different ways they can solve the same problem. Do they exterminate the goblin camp or side with them? Can they pickpocket the vendor for powerful items to avoid paying? Can they talk their way out of being arrested, either through smooth-talking or saber-rattling? Every decision opens doors and closes others. Each interaction can forge new allies or enemies. Every quest has multiple endings, good or bad. Players can play the campaign however they want and will be rewarded for their creative thinking along the way.

Puzzle Games You Have To Be A Genius To Complete

5 Jobs AI Just Can't

By Rishabh Chauhan

Today we’ll look at profession that will be thorny for AI to smash up or substitute ones that could put huge points on the board if they use AI judiciously.

Leadership role requires vision and courage before anything else. AI hasn't got it, nor can it get and even help with it.

1.Leadership

Jobs in Music, art, filmmaking, reporting require lots of creativity, these heavily rely on human emotions.

2.Creative Professions

Many problems can be solved with linear thinking that left brain can only do.

3.Creative Problem-Solving

The job of doctor is irreplaceable, it requires critical thinking human understanding and experience.

4.Health Care

Research work requires innovation, analysis, new approach and experimental thinking that can be done by Humans.

5.Research and Development