THE SPECIALIST WITH A UNIVERSAL MIND

Creativity in problem identification

by Andrew Vazsonyi, Feature Editor

If I had any lingering doubt about teaching creativity, it is over. The publication of Couger's book (Couger, J. D., Creative Problem Solving and Opportunity Finding, boyd & fraser Publishing Company, 1995) removed the last excuse. It is reported that creativity training is required by more than half of Fortune 500 companies. Still, the subject of creativity has never matured into respectability in academia, and most emphatically, not in the decision sciences.

Alex Osborn (1963), the founder of creative training, introduced the four rules of brainstorming: (1) the wilder an idea, the better, (2) quantity of ideas breeds quality of ideas, (3) seek many new combinations, and (4) defer judging ideas until a later time.

The most important application of creativity, I believe, is to avoid solving the wrong problem, failing to find/diagnose the right problem. Our literature is full of anecdotes where people worked on the wrong problem. Creativity techniques offer a natural way to uncover the real problem.

Consider, for example, the well-known technique of making absurd recommendations. Here are some examples where a good solution might have been found by this technique.

Passengers complained that baggage delivery at the air terminal was too slow.

Suggestion: Make it even slower.
Solution: Move the tarmac further away, so that by the time the passengers arrive at the terminal, the baggage is there.

Train passengers complained about foul air in tunnels.

Suggestion: Make the air intolerably dirty.
Solution: Put up signs for passengers to close the windows.

Riders complained that the elevators were too slow in an office building.

Suggestion: Make the elevators even slower.
Solution: Provide mirrors inside the elevators.

The firm lost money because there was too much scrap when cutting jackets.

Suggestion: Manufacture scrap.
Solution: Make jackets out of scrap.

The creativity people came up with a bag of tricks, and Couger presents a summary of twenty-two creativity tools in the appendix of his book. Here is a sample I selected from the literature and adapted to problem identification.

Bag of Tricks

Provocations and challenges
These are not attacks, criticisms, put-downs, but questions: ``Are there better ways?'' They are thrown at managers when they think they have the solution. This is the opposite of the ``Don't fix it if it ain't broke'' philosophy.

Relational combinations
Combine some elements of the situation with randomly selected relational words, such as ``before,'' ``below,'' or ``over.'' For example, this could have been applied to the jackets versus scrap problem already discussed.

Wear six thinking hats
Each mind-set is given a hat of different color. This makes it practical to switch explicitly between different modes of thinking. The six modes are:

White hat: Information thinking
Red hat: Intuition and feeling
Black hat: Caution and the logical negative
Yellow hat: The logical positive
Green hat: Creative effort and creative thinking
Blue hat: Control of thinking process itself.

Stepping stone provocations
You deliberately turn things upside down, inside out. Reverse the traditional sequence of thoughts and actions. Exaggerate and distort.

Headlines and book titles
Ask the manager to state the situation/problem in a single short sentence, and focus idea generation on the concepts covered by the single sentence.

Random input and forced connections
Fling in a totally random, irrelevant idea, and force a connection between the problem and the random thought. It may be a word picked randomly from the dictionary, generated by a computer, from a set of poems, famous quotations, from other irrelevant or relevant topics.

Calculated mess generation
Typically, when a manager faces a new situation, it is a mess. But it often happens managers think they know what the situation is and what the problems are. This is an even more perilous predicament, because the first thing to do is to create a mess deliberately, and then start to work the problem.

Affinity charts
When a group starts brainstorming a mess, each actor writes each idea on a 2-by-4 card. Copies are made for each actor, and then each separately groups the ideas into the specific classes of an individual affinity chart. Afterwards, the group gets together again and creates a joint affinity chart.

Idea transformation
Return to a previously generated idea and create variations and refinements. For example, you may exchange the sequence of the actions, such as make jackets first, and then scrap jackets and vests.

Conclusions

This is only a small sample of what is available, and I haven't even touched on graphics and computer-based creativity systems. What we need is actual experience on how to integrate these techniques into our courses. I would be delighted to cooperate with you, and later organize sessions and publish our experiences.

Dr. Andrew Vazsonyi
156 Oak Island Dr.
Santa Rosa, CA 95409
707-539-0272 / fax: 707-537-1833
CompuServe: 102113,1352
e-mail: 102113.1352@Compuserve.com