7 Steps To Being A Better Creative Thinker

August 7, 2007 · Filed Under Brand, Branding, Business, Business Model, Creative Thinking Techniques, Creativity, Customer Experience, Innovation, Myers-Briggs, Personality 

The scenario - you’ve been given a messy problem to solve on your own. It’s time to shine as a creative thinker. Your strategy:

1. Set an idea quota. Aim high. Set a goal of about 40-50 ideas.

2. Manipulate the problem. Determine the essence of the problem. Restate it ten different ways. Find the key words and break out the thesaurus. Think about what the perfect ending looks like. Identify the challenges and opportunies. Develop a problem set that refines and focuses the initial problem.

3. Write down all you initial ideas as rapidly as possible. Don’t censor yourself, just write down whatever springs into your mind. Try to think of 10-15 ideas. Are any of the ideas related? Arrange them into whatever themes you see, then think of a few more ideas around the themes.

4. Restate the problem based on your initial ideas. Do any of your ideas need fleshing out? Turn the ideas into ‘how to’ or ‘how might we’ statements. Then repeat step 3).

5. Break out the creative thinking tools. Use tools like Random Words, SCAMPER, Morphological Analysis, and Reversing Assumptions to generate scads of novel ideas. Repeat step 3) to categorize and flesh out the best ideas.

6. Converge. Choose the 10-15 ideas or groups of ideas that you think are the best. Turn each into a solution by writing a narrative explaining the idea in detail and describing what it will take to implement it.

7. Collaborate. Send your solutions to a few people you trust and ask them to assess them as we’ve described before. For each solution ask them to list 5-6 implementation actions. Gather and categorize their responses. Integrate their new ideas into the solutions as appropriate. Create an implementation plan using the best recommended actions.

Step back and marvel at what you’ve accomplished.

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One Response to “7 Steps To Being A Better Creative Thinker”

  1. 7 Steps To Being A Better Creative Thinker « Open Source Innovation on March 11th, 2008 3:05 am

    [...] 7 Steps To Being A Better Creative Thinker Posted on August 7, 2007 by Innovation Catalyst Open Source Innovation has moved - here is the new link to 7 Steps To Being A Better Creative Thinker [...]

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