“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations”
~Charles R. Swindol
If it is not today or tomorrow, you can pretty much guarantee that the day after you will be faced with some sort of problem either at home or work. “Such is life” my grandfather use to say when problems would come up and he had been through some tough times coming to America as an immigrant and dealing with the struggles that came with it. He would always smile and laugh, then start coming up with ideas to remedy the problem. Since we also know that there is no getting away from problems and difficult situations we need to do the same thing. What my grandfather was doing, was what we call today “creative thinking”, he would talk out loud about the many different possibilities of fixing the problem and what the outcome might be. Creative thinking is the ability to imagine or invent something new or coming up with new ideas by changing existing ones or merging a few ideas together. When you do this with others in your family or co-workers you are expanding the limits of what possibilities there are to solve the issue, not only is this great but it can be exhilarating when you see what you have come up with. There are four basic steps to creative problem solving, the first is being able to define what the problem is so that everyone understands it or if it is just you, that you really know what the problem is. The next step is to come up with as many solutions as you (and others) can think of. Write them down and don’t try to analyze them yet, just get the ideas out and down on paper. Once this is done then you can go through them keeping the ones that may be possibilities or possibly even a combination of a couple of them. Lastly you need to make a choice of what solution makes the best sense to resolving the problem and take action on it. Creative thinking does take practice, but the more you do it the better and easier it will be. The sky is the limit to what you can come up with to help you make decisions about those “great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations” A good article on creative problem solving link is below, there are some great ideas to help your team out.
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