Usually, when solving problems, generating candidate solutions isn't difficult. What is difficult is finding hidden ideas, or sorting through ideas to isolate the most promising ones. Here's a little catalog of ideas for sorting ideas.
- Examine boring ideas
- Look for ideas that seem workable but boring. Their dreary nature can lead to a bias against them. Few people want to work on them, and securing resources for them might be difficult because they're so unexciting. But workability is what counts. Set your own bias aside, and seek ways to persuade others to do the same.
- Examine unoriginal ideas
- Lack of originality is another source of bias against ideas. Look for an idea that someone has already tried. If it proved unworkable, ask why. If those reasons are still in place, can you remove them or skirt them somehow?
- Examine inelegant ideas
- Because inelegance can be more repulsive than workability can be attractive, we often reject inelegant but workable ideas. To recruit supporters, or to secure resources, emphasize that success is a form of beauty.
- Examine politically encumbered ideas
- Some Some perfectly workable ideas
are rejected, or regarded as
unworkable, when they
carry political baggageperfectly workable ideas are rejected, or regarded as unworkable, when they carry political baggage. Perhaps they offend someone powerful, or they don't conform to the preferences of another powerful person. In these cases, the problem to be solved is political in nature. Focus not on the original problem, but instead on the politics. - Examine expensive ideas
- Yet another source of bias against ideas is their apparent cost, or their apparent need for skills and knowledge that are in short supply. In these cases, work on resolving the resource issues. What can you do to reduce costs? How can you be clever about finding people who can do the job?
- Examine crazy ideas
- Ideas with reputations for being obviously crazy sometimes inherit their reputations from the people who originated them, rather than by earning their reputations by being truly crazy. Look carefully at the idea itself, setting aside what you know about its originator. Is the idea itself truly crazy?
- Examine past successes
- When you finally solved a problem, what was the critical element that led to a solution? By examining your history, you might find a pattern among those critical elements. Patterns can arise from weakness in problem-solving skills, or unfamiliarity with the problem domain, or the culture in which you work. If you can identify the pattern, you can use it to guide a search for solutions to the current problem.
Finally, deal with your own biases by intentionally searching for ideas you regard as crazy. This stance helps to relax the constraints that conceal solutions. When you find an intriguingly crazy solution, ask, "What makes it crazy?" Can you adjust it so that its craziness is no longer obvious? Is there anything about it that could be useful? Top Next Issue
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Related articles
More articles on Problem Solving and Creativity:
- Choices for Widening Choices
- Choosing is easy when you don't have much to choose from. That's one reason why groups sometimes don't
recognize all the possibilities — they're happiest when choosing is easy. When we notice this
happening, what can we do about it?
- Wishful Thinking and Perception: I
- How we see the world defines our experience of it, because our perception is our reality. But how we
see the world isn't necessarily how the world is.
- Power Distance and Teams
- One of the attributes of team cultures is something called ``Em''power distance``/Em'', which is a measure
of the overall comfort people have with inequality in the distribution of power. Power distance can
determine how well a team performs when executing high-risk projects.
- Goodhart's Law and Reification
- Goodhart's Law, applied to organizations, is an observation about managing by metrics. When we make
known the goals for our metrics, we risk having the metrics lose their ability to measure. The risk
is elevated when we try to "measure" abstractions.
- Contrary Indicators of Psychological Safety: II
- When we begin using new tools or processes, we make mistakes. Practice is the cure, but practice can
be scary if the grace period for early mistakes is too short. For teams adopting new methods, psychological
safety is a fundamental component of success.
See also Problem Solving and Creativity and Problem Solving and Creativity for more related articles.
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- The Storming stage of Tuckman's development sequence for small groups is when the group explores its frustrations and degrees of disagreement about both structure and task. Only by understanding these misalignments is reaching alignment possible. Here is a framework for this exploration. Available here and by RSS on January 29.
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