Steps in Deliberate Problem Solving - Part 1

Articles In This Section:

· Steps in Deliberate Problem Solving - Part 1

· Steps in Deliberate Problem Solving - Part 2

· Step 1 • Orienting the Problem - Part 1

· Step 1 • Orienting the Problem - Part 2

· Step 2 • Get the Facts - Part 1

· Step 2 • Get the Facts - Part 2

· Step 3 • Get Ideas

· Step 4 • Incubate!

· Step 5 • Evaluate Your Ideas - Part 1

· Step 5 • Evaluate Your Ideas - Part 2

· Step 5 • Evaluate Your Ideas - Part 3

One of the most interesting, vital, and promising arts to be placed at the disposal of business executives in several hundred years is the concept of deliberate creative problem solving.

The idea that you can "force feed" your mind into finding ideas and problem solutions is a relatively new one. Like all new ideas, it has far to go in winning complete acceptance from everyone who meets up with it. There are many people who still feel that you have to depend upon inspiration to incite creative activity. And there are others who dislike the idea of working as hard as you sometimes do to force an elusive idea out into the openness of your mind. These people want "bright" ideas to come without any expenditure of effort. The truth is that both these methods do occasionally produce ideas, some of which might be called brilliant. But, in the long run, they are certain to be erratic and, therefore, unreliable producers of innovations.

As was mentioned earlier in this book, the man most responsible for focusing attention on the ability to be deliberately creative is probably Alex F. Osborn. Although he had famous forerunners in the theoretical applications of disciplined creativity, such as Aristotle and John Dewey, as well as contemporaries, notably James Webb Young, author of A Technique for Producing Ideas, and Robert Crawford, author of The Techniques of Creative Thinking, Osborn's series of books, culminating in Applied Imagination, were the ones to win widespread readership and popularity. Much of his success was probably due to the almost overnight popularity of the "Brainstorming" procedure, which was described in his last two books, and which literally took the country's brains by storm. It may prove, in the long run, that the greatest contribution Brainstorming per se made to creativity was to get many more people interested in studying up on the subject than would ever have done so without the technique. If so, Brain-storming has rightly earned its place as a creative contribution to mankind!

In the wake of Mr. Osborn's writings and stimulation, came the interest of business executives and less dogmatic types of educators. Among the latter may be counted Dr. John Arnold, whose Creative Engineering courses, conducted while he was on the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gained national fame. Dr. Arnold has since moved to Stanford University, in California, where he continues to innovate and to challenge more conventional educators with his teaching methods.

Probably the greatest impetus to the movement toward more creativity in business, science, education, and government came with the establishment of the annual Creative Problem Solving Institute at the University of Buffalo, New York, jointly sponsored by Mr. Osborn's Creative Education Foundation and the University. There, leaders and thought-leaders from all fields of endeavor gather every June to study, assimilate, and examine every aspect of deliberate creativity. Leaders for the Institute are selected on the basis of contributions they can make in specific fields, and the objective of each Institute is to present the latest news to interested people who can, in turn, use the information they gain as a base for adding to our knowledge of the elusive creative process.