Curious Realizer - three introductions to creative problem solving

Three books that provide gateways into the discipline of creative problem solving

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina 🇺🇦 on Unsplash

Introduction

Years ago, during my exploration of Life, the Internet and Everything, I came across a powerful problem solving tool that I want to share with you in this post.

Creative problem solving (I’ll abbreviate it using the term CPS), is a series of techniques originally developed by Alex Osbourne and Sid Parnes. It’s a technique used to handle big, messy, tricky problems but it can be adapted to smaller scale problems. Hopefully you’ll find this interesting!

Per Wikipedia.org

Creative problem-solving is the mental process of searching for an original and previously unknown solution to a problem. To qualify, the solution must be novel and reached independently.

Taking it a step further, creative problem solving uses the combination of creative and critical thinking techniques to solve non-standard or non-routine problems:

• Creative thinking to come up with possibilities

• Critical thinking to evaluate the possibilities

In this post I’ll share three great books which provide different gateways into the discipline of creative problem solving. They are fun, easy to read books which have different approaches to introducing CPS to the reader.

---

Jack’s Notebook - Gregg Fraley

Over a decade ago when I was blogging at Thoughtwrestling I came into contact with Gregg Fraley, a creativity and innovation expert, and he was kind enough to provide me with a copy of Jack’s Notebook. This book is a “business novel about creative problem solving” which describes a simple but effective version of CPS. The protagonist, Jack, is befriended by a mysterious fellow names Manny Gibran who teaches him CPS, using a notebook as a way of collecting information to help him solve some of his life challenges.

Fraley uses the following six step framework to introduce CPS:

Problem Exploration

1. Identify the Challenge: what problem is vexing you?

2. Facts & Feeling Exploration: what do you know about this situation and how do you feel about it?

3. Problem Framing & Reframing: using the information you’ve gathered to date, can you come up with a better, more complete problem statement?

Brainstorming

4. Idea Generation: use brainstorming or similar techniques to ask questions and identify possible solutions

Getting into Action

5. Solution Development: refine your questions and answers to date in a possible means to resolve the problem

6. Action Planning: determine tasks, align resources and prepare to implement your solution

I recommend Jack’s Notebook to anyone who’s never heard of CPS before, especially younger readers - it’s a light and fun introduction but it’s backed by a solid approach.

---

Think Better - Tim Hurson

I’d recommend Hurson’s book to people who may already have some practical problem solving experience but aren’t looking for something heavy on theory. While non-fiction, Think Better is easy to follow but provides a few more business or professional contexts (like new product development) to apply CPS techniques. I may have also received a review copy of Think Better from Tim Hurson but I honestly don’t remember for sure!

The key steps in Hurson’s Productive Thinking Model are very similar to Fraley’s version. The Productive Thinking Model uses the following six steps:

1. What’s Going On?

2. What’s Success?

3. What’s the Question?

4. Generate Answers

5. Forge The Solution

6. Align Resources

Hurson breaks each of the steps into multiple components and uses a series of business scenarios to explain how each works.

To me, the most memorable technique that Hurson describes is “getting to the third third”. It’s an approach to idea generation (i.e. brainstorming) which pushes the problem solver to go beyond the easy answers to ideas that take more thinking and creativity to discover. It works like this: when generating a large number of ideas (dozens, let’s say), the ideas will fit into roughly three groupings:

The first third - these are the ideas that are easy to think of, probably the most obvious approaches to solving a problem.

The second third - this set of ideas is a bit harder to come up with: once you exhaust the obvious answers to a problem you have to think a bit more deeply to come up with new ideas which don’t duplicate what you’ve already come up with.

The third third - this group of ideas are the hardest to come up with because they demand more original and deeper thinking to discover. However, in Hurson’s experience, this level of idea generation can lead to the most creative solutions. There is a very strong parallel to this approach in the 100 questions exercise in Michael Gelb’s 100 questions exercise from How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci. As Gelb noted, going beyond 50 questions becomes progressively harder, which eventually gets to the same level of creativity as the “third third”.

I highly recommend Think Better!

---

Advantage Play - David Ben

In many ways, Advantage Play is my favorite guide to creative problem solving because the spine of this book is magic tricks and how to create them. The author David Ben is a former tax lawyer turned professional magician. Originally a shy young man, Ben was befriended by professional magicians like Ross Bertram and Stewart James and became a magician himself.

Ben also became an expert on Dai Vernon, another famous magician in the first half of the 20th century who had the distinction of stumping Harry Houdini. Houdini claimed he could figure out how any other magician performed a magic trick just by watching it done, but he failed to determine how Vernon did a seemingly simple card trick (Vernon played a clever trick on Houdini but I won’t spoil it here...)

One again, Ben presents a framework for creative problem solving similar to the other two books but Ben spends a lot of time on idea generation. He spends a chapter on this and focuses on the example of Stewart James, who generated more than 1,000 magic tricks during his life. Stewart James’s techniques are so interesting (to me, at least) that I’ll feature them as my next Curious Realizer post.

I’m always amazed that more people don’t know about this book because I’ve always found it to be fascinating. On the surface it may seem a bit dull or even chintzy but there’s literally creative magic in this book.

---

Hopefully you’ve found this overview to be interesting and I hope you take a chance and read these books. Over to you: do you have any interesting or helpful problem solving resources that you’d like to share?

PS: I’m giving away a Dingbats* Wildlife series notebook to a lucky H.A.T. subscriber to celebrate the 9th month of starting How About This! To earn additional chances to win, make a comment on any January 2023 post!