Learninghub4success

Managing problems is part of every employee. Once we learn how to manage the problems and the process of making effective decisions, we are in a far better position to take full advantage to access the untapped creative power of our employees. The successful 21^st century business firms recognize the power of creativity and innovation for their survival, growth and continued success.

Creativity, as a thinking process is about developing new ideas, products and services through associating existing ideas, products and services. Creativity is not about trying create something out of nothing. Creativity is basically about keeping an open mind so that we can learn to view new opportunities through combination of ideas and practices. Due to the imaginative nature of creative thinking, we are able to develop overabundance of ideas.

People tend to view the logical/critical thinking and creative thinking as opposite to each other. While there is nothing wrong to view the 2 concepts in that manner, we should not make the mistake that since they are opposite in their emphasis, their use is exclusive to each other. Effective problem solving and thinking strategies demand that we incorporate both the thinking strategies in managing our decision making in work situations.

While accepting the logical and critical thinking style in our decision making as a dominant approach, we should accept the usefulness of creative thinking to generate new innovative solutions. Traditionally managers use brainstorming technique to generate ideas. Unfortunately when brainstorming became a tool to develop alternatives, the focus was on creating as many possible options as possible, hoping the number will give some innovative and unique solutions to the problem that was being discussed. Absence of any focused training on the proper use of brainstorming, also limited the business firms from reaping the full benefits of brainstorming as originally envisioned by Alex Osborne. Osborne believed that using brainstorming in groups will enhance the number of creative ideas. To achieve this, the team leader must be well trained to encourage the team members to think out of the box so that they are able to generate unusual and innovative ideas. The group should continue to work towards combining and improving ideas already submitted. The major challenge facing the team leader is “How do I go about inspiring people to generate unusual ideas?”.

SCAMPER, a checklist type of prompter developed by Bob Eberle became a useful tool that can be used to generate unusual ideas. With right questioning skills, SCAMPER can become a powerful tool that will encourage the team members to think unusual ideas. SCAMPER stands for:

Substitute – Can we replace this material with another … ?

Combine – What can we combine or integrate this to make it …..?

Adapt – Is there a possibility to alter or adapt something —– ?

Modify/Magnify/Minify – Could a change in size, color, quality will make any difference?

Put to another Use – Is there another use for this product/services?

Eliminate – Anything we can get rid of to make it more ….. ?

Reverse – Can we change the process the other way?

The use of SCAMPER model during the brainstorming session, enable the team members continue to generate new and creative ideas.