One of the Best Creative Problem-Solving Techniques
For the majority of people, mornings are all about routine. We go through the motions of getting ready to prepare for the day ahead without thinking too much about it.
It’s because our brains recognize this morning pattern in our thinking, store it, and pull it out when it is necessary-every morning. This pattern doesn’t work for creative work, though.
It means when we face a new problem, the routine way of thinking works only for unimaginative ideas. We cannot quickly develop any creative strategy for our thinking. In this case, it’s crucial to transition into the creative thinking mode and unleash our full creative potential.
As a software engineer and a self-made investor, writing blog posts about investment and personal finance is a methodical and analytical exercise.
There’s a lot of research and fact-checking to be done before publishing, and then there’s the structural organization of the content.
All of these activities rely on systematic thinking. Therefore, the words also need to leap off the page to connect with my audience. To achieve this, I must create content that evokes an emotional reaction in my reader.
It is all too easy to get stuck in an educational or informational rut while writing.
And one of the best activities to unlock creativity and find the solution for a problem is brainstorming.
This intuitive approach allows producing many ideas and leaves evaluation for later. What’s important, that the production and assessment of ideas are two separate phases in the problem-solving process.
The reason for suppressing evaluation is that the efficient production of ideas requires a mental state that is not discouraged by criticism, and all the internal filters are just gone.
If not criticized, a silly idea can become a Eureka.
Brainstorming is usually applied to generate new, creative, and unique ideas, which may be very difficult to come up with.
This technique is most often thought of as a team technique. You can still do solo brainstorming.
Several studies have shown that individual brainstorming produces more and often better ideas than group brainstorming:
“Brainwriting is simple. Rather than ask participants to yell out ideas (a serial process), you ask them to write down their ideas about a particular question or problem on sheets of paper for a few minutes; then, you have each participant pass their ideas on to someone else, who reads the ideas and adds new ideas. After a few minutes, you ask the participants to pass their papers to others, and the process repeats. After 10 to 15 minutes, you collect the sheets and post them for immediate discussion.”––Chauncey Wilson is a User Experience Architect at Autodesk, Inc.
In fact, a group is quite capable of generating and refining useful ideas in the right direction that will be perfectly set up into action in the future.
Mostly, that’s because people pay so much attention to other people’s ideas.
If you work in a team, you have most likely participated in a brainstorming session or 2 or 10. That sounds very agile!
As a result, you have noticed that often people cannot generate their own or forget about their passing thoughts while waiting for their turn to shout out their idea. Basically, their creative thinking is “blocked.”
Hence, don’t hesitate to brainstorm by yourself.
There are a bunch of techniques you can try for that:
Despite that, here is my fast and straightforward approach on how to boost your creative thinking by brainstorming by yourself:
It’s free brainwriting:
- Sit down for 15 minutes, and write down all of your ideas to solve your problem that comes to your mind.
- Then look at that list of ideas and start with idea evaluation.
- Next, logically rate ideas from the best to the worst one.
- Pick your top 3 ideas.
- If possible, get constructive feedback from others, in your opinion, on your best three. Ask which idea is a “winner.”
- Depending on the “winner” choice, go for it!
When you have gone through these steps and finally have the solution to your challenge, you may feel the work is done.
It allows you to access a stream of creativity that lies just below the surface of your consciousness.
Train your mind to access those thoughts, and you will release your inner creativity.
The most challenging aspect of brainwriting is to break the bad habits that interfere with your ability to channel those subconscious thoughts. It’s about tuning out your conscious thoughts and tuning into the subconscious ones.
Every day our brains take in all the stimuli around us but can only process so much of it; the rest goes “underground” into the subconscious.
The more you brainstorming while writing, the easier it becomes.
Stick with it, and you’ll reap the benefits. Most people need to practice brainwriting multiple times before it feels natural and effective.
So be patient…
Brainwriting will help you move from conscious (deliberate) brainstorming to subconscious (automatic) brainstorming. When you achieve success, your ideas will stream from you without consciously thinking about them.
If you’re usually an analytical thinker, brainwriting may sound a little “out there”, and to be honest, that was my initial impression. But once you’ve used the brainwriting technique a few times, you will start to feel more attuned to your creative side.
So, don’t knock this creative process until you’ve tried it!
You can also combine solo brainwriting with team brainstorming.
Once the facilitator has explained the challenge in front of the team members, give everybody 15 mins to perform step 1 from brainwriting, and then collect all the ideas and discuss them in the group.
Give this brainstorming technique a try, and see the difference it will provide the next time you explore solutions and improve creative thinking.
It’s great as an exercise and a way to form the habit of generating ideas quickly and shutting out the internal filter/critic that we should do it more.
Please continue to keep up the creativity, iterate on the idea, and direct it toward constantly improving your solution. Have fun!
Thank you for reading!
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