You want to stand out from everyone else in the workplace to show your value as an employee. What better way to do this than through creative problem solving!? This week in our creativity series we will be going over the Osborn Parnes creative problem-solving process. It can provide a structural approach to finding resolutions and can result in multiple solutions to your problems. His model is structured as such:
1. Mess-finding/objective finding: this where you determine the goal of your problem solving will be.
2. Fact-finding: this phase you gather data to fully understand your problem.
3. Problem-finding: you dig deeper here into the problem to find the root of it. Here you also reframe the problem to compose creative and valuable solutions.
4. Idea-finding: this is where the team come up with options for addressing the problem.
5. Solution-finding: this part is where you choose the best options from the ideas phase.
6. Action-finding: this is where you develop a plan of action to implement the solution you have come up with.
This process involves convergent and divergent thinking. Convergent thinking is the process of evaluating ideas, analyzing them and then choosing the best solution. Divergent thinking is the process of coming up with multiple solutions and ideas to problems. This is the “out of the box” style of thinking that one may think of when talking about creative thinking. Convergent thinking compliments divergent to come up with more creative solutions. Using this problem-solving process can give you some extra tools to create solutions in the workplace. You will stand out as a thought leader who knows how to collaborate with others. This will do wonders for your professional reputation.
