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Steps in Deliberate Problem Solving - Part 2

The methods advocated for deliberate problem solving are not, in any way, magic formulas or mystic rites that will produce imaginative thinking. Nor are the principles underlying the use of the techniques to be considered as absolute dogma that must be accepted at face value. Rather, both principles and methods are the result of closely observing the great creative minds of history and the present; and, through cross-comparisons, arriving at some basic characteristics these minds seem to have in common. The working methods are those that creative persons seem either to prefer or to use in common.

The steps, or principles, observed in attacking a problem are basically five:

Orienting, or defining, the problem

Getting the facts needed to work on the problem

Getting ideas as tentative solutions

Incubating the problem

Evaluating the tentative solutions produced

By comparing these steps with the observed and reported methods used by known creative people covered in Chapter 5, it will be seen that the translation from creative theory to recom­mended creative practice has been almost a literal one. These steps are really simplified statements of the normal, often unconscious, operations of creative minds when confronted with problems.

It should be pointed out that you would seldom follow these steps in just this order in the normal course of working over a problem. In fact, it is frequently difficult to see where one step leaves off and another starts; and sometimes it is difficult to see any clear-cut order whatever. A person may begin to get ideas while he is still consciously in the fact-gathering stage. After finishing incubation, he may decide that he wants still more facts —the facts that, when he first plunged into the problem, he did not know he would need. But in deliberately trying to court ideas, it could pay you to deliberately follow the sequence—at least to the point of making sure that you have covered all the steps.

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