7 Strategies To Improve Your Creative Problem Solving Ability

I realize a lot of your are focused on the practical benefits of learning marketing, advertising, SEO, PPC, CPA, etc. It's definitely important to know all the basics and advanced methodology to start up a business online. However, once you get off your duff and start working things out, you inevitably run into problems along the way. WF is a wonderful resource for answering quick, simple and sometimes difficult questions from user ideas. But, sometimes there are problems that you can't get a quick answer to OR, there are simple answers but you are trying to innovate them to A) make a better business, B) get a bigger share of the market, and/or C) simply get yourself started with a new and great idea.

So the question is, "how do we get our brains moving in the right direction, while staying away from what's been done 1,000,000 times before?"

I'd like to share with you all a few of the techniques, tools, and methods that I've been learning about in the field of creative problem solving. Yes, believe it or not, there is an ENTIRE field of research being done on this one concept and has been making leaps and bounds in the past couple of decades. You find some of these techniques to be old fashioned or scoff at the lack of their practical usability, but it's about learning to harness your brain power for unconventional thinking. There is no easy answer. These are simply tools that you can use to get the ball rolling and to start yourself down the path to something truly unique, creative and ground breaking. Something that can surely make you tons of cash.

All of the following ideas are products of much study and research. If you wish to find out anything more on any of these strategies, please feel free to PM me for any questions on finding more material on them. Or, you can email me at yourcreativityunleashed@gmail.com.

So, enough blather, let's hear those 7 strats already!

1. Attribute Replacement: This technique is very simply and very affective. The idea is to take a product or service and reshape the value of one of its qualities. For example, if you are selling a service for social bookmarking, you might think about the main objective or reason that people use this service. It saves them time. By considering the time factor you could come up with the offer of completing a certain task in under a certain amount of time, or you would offer a bonus. So, if you don't complete the task of placing 150 social bookmarks for a webpage in under a few days, you would generously give them an extra 50 bookmarks, perhaps. It might even be a good idea to "accidently" not complete a few tasks on time and give a few customers that benefit so that they can actually experience the benefit and come back to you more often hoping for the same thing to happen. This is great because it creates an entirely new market based on your offer that you can dominate!
2. Parallel Thinking: This is a technique that uses a simple trick to get your mind focused on one part of the problem at a time. It uses 6 different "hats", or lines of thinking that you use one at a time to make your mind into a problem solving laser. The hats include:
   • • Blue hat - This is used at the beginning and end of a thinking session and is used to facilitate and plan our the brainstorming session. This hat is used to make sure that every other hat stays on task and in the same direction; towards the ultimate success of the problem.
     • White hat - Usually used at the beginning of the process, to setup a background by seeking out unknown information and necessary tools for are needed. It consists of neutral fact and data compilation.
     • Red hat - This hat is used to vent emotions, feelings and intuition about the problem without any need to justify them. This is to make sure that our core values and feelings are heard so that proper decisions can be made later on. In the end, all decisions are based on good or bad relative feelings.
     • Green hat - This hat is used in conjunction with the black hat. It is used to generate ideas, alternatives and generation options and bolster each idea by modifying any suggested ideas.
     • Black hat - This hat plays the devil's advocate and is used to relate cautionary and critical thinking. It is used to keep things logical and to converge the random assortment of ideas generated by the green hat. Weaknesses of an idea are considered during this time.
     • Yellow hat - This hat is the direct opposite of the black hat and seeks out any positive ideas about any of the random ideas put forward. Positive feedback should be logical and constructive.
3. DATT - Direct Attention Thinking Tools: These are a list of 10 different tools that are used to help sharpen a person's perception and focus their thinking to improve their situation-defining skills. This is meant to clarify problems so that goals, key values, consequences, objectives, other people's views, priorities, and designs are taken into account. No serious problems should be tackled without first considering these issues. Seeing as there are 10 different tools to explain, I won't make this post into a thesis and simply leave you with the basic explanation of it so that you can understand where and when you would use it, and if you want to find out more about it.
4. Analogical Techniques: This technique consists of transforming strange things into familiar ones. The idea is to create an analogy to the problem you are having and make it relate to some past problem or situation that you were able to figure out. There are three different ideas within this technique, which are:
   1. • Direct analogy - This is the comparison of one thing with another and requires searching your own experience and knowledge for something similar. EX: Take the value of premium gasoline for your car's performance and relate it to the use of vitamins for your own body's health. Premium Gas is to a car's performance as vitamins are to a body's health.
      • Personal analogy - Is the empathetic identification of something outside yourself. EX: a plumber might try to visualize the fixtures and pipes inside a system and imagine the water flowing through it to try and figure out where a blockage might occur. He might ask himself, "If I were a block of food, where would I best be situated to sit for a long time?"
      • Compressed conflict - Finding closely coupling words that are almost paradoxical. Words that fight one another. EX: involuntary willingness; balanced confusion; connected pauses
5. Trigger Mechanisms: These are words that help to stimulate your mind into directly finding the solution to an abstract problem. These include such words as:
   • • Subtraction words: remove certain parts of elements; compress or make smaller; what can be diposed or reduced; can any rules be broken?; how can it be simplified?
     • Addition words: extent or expand; augment; advance; magnidy
     • Transfer words: move to a new situation; adapt; transpose; relocate and dislocate; translate or transfigure
     • Empathizing words: sympathize with a situation or subject; put yourself in it's shoes; relate to it emotionally and subjectively
     • Other words: animate; superimpose; chance scale; substitute; isolate; distort; disguise; contradict; hybridize; symbolize; fantasize; repeat; combine
6. Mixing Divergency and Convergency: This is a very simple concept that simply relies on trading off between generative thinking and selective thinking. Most creative problem solving methodologies rely on this kind of thinking, but here are a couple of specific ways to do so.
   • Divergent Guidelines:
     • Defer judgement - Postpone all judgements of ideas until you've generated enough ideas or reached your benchmark or quota.
     • Strive for quantity - By generating as many ideas as possible, you raise the chances of hitting on a truly quality idea that surpasses all previously known limits to success.
     • Seek wild options - Thinking of crazy, irrational, and emotional ideas can lead you to something truly ground breaking
     • Seek combinations - Suggest altering, combining, modifying, or building off of a previously generated option
   • Convergent Guidelines:
     • Judge affirmatively - Look for the strengths of an idea before trying to look at how it's a bad idea or if it's impossible or not.
     • Be deliberate - Giving each option a fair chance ensures that you do not overlook potentially winning ideas that can be overlooked easily.
     • Seek novelty - Attach yourself to solutions that are new and unique before moving onto small changes to old ideas.
     • Check objectives - Emphasizing the importance of remembering the main objectives and goals will keep you on track and not waste time.
7. Concept Fan: The concept fan is a wonderful for getting quick and great solutions to a problem. It starts out by considering the desired outcome to the problem and working backwards from the end outcome. Imagine doing one of those maze puzzles in the newspaper. Isn't it always the easiest (and possibly a cheating) way to start at the end and go towards the beginning? This technique harnesses that idea. Imagine the problem of a city coping with a water shortage. Think of the directions you could go to help resolve this issue. They could be resolved by: reducing the consumption of water, increasing the supply, or doing without water. Then, you take each of these directions and fan out in a broader array of possbilities, or concepts, into more possibilities. Taking the reduce consumption of water direction, we could come up with these concepts: increase efficiency of water use, less waste of water, discourage use of water, educate on the problem. We could go even further by faning out each individual concept into specific ideas. Using the discourage use of water idea, we could come up with: meter the water, charge for water use, raise charge of water use, water only at certain times, put a harmless bad smell into the water, restrict use of gardens, pool, etc, publish names of heavy users, threaten to ration water. By breaking down each concept into simpler and easier to handle ideas we can broaden our scope of the problem and create a multitude of potential ideas.

I hope one, some, or all of these ideas can prove useful to you guys. Let me know if you apprecaited these, or if you think there are issues with them. Thanks for your time, and enjoy