Immediately yours to use with whatever situation
by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
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Creative Problem-Solving, Genius-Level Creativity, and YOU
Find, right here, and use today if you like, on as many different questions as you like, this information and these or other specific methods for solution-finding.
Most people don’t know that they can be very creative and ingenious, but various enterprises in the worldwide movement in creative problem-solving have been training tens of thousands of people into high levels of creativity and ingenuity for better than a half-century. During that stretch of time, I have made a career out of developing readily used methods which anyone can learn and practice and use on the problems they most want to solve. See the free Directory which links you to twenty-some different and likewise free methods and techniques of creative problem-solving provided on this website, step by easy specific step. That Directory is pretty well loaded already, but I’m trying to persuade my colleagues in the movement to expand that Directory from their own methodology to be a truly interdisciplinary world resource accessible to anyone who can get onto the Web. Meanwhile, here is a kind of overall step-by-specific step:
- Decide what question you want to answer or what problem to solve. (Sometimes your definition of this will change as you work on it—and that happening is all to the good, signifying that your perceptions of the issue are evolving.) Generally pick a question or problem that you would dearly love to get good answer to, one that is truly worthwhile solving, one whose likely outcome is a “win” for everyone who would be affected by its solution. You can use as many different methods as you please, on as many different problems as you please. There is no need to ration, but pick one definite one to start.
- Write down the question or problem. That’s important psychologically—now you are doing something to the problem instead of it doing things to you. Be as specific as you can, so you can pick away at parts of the problem and carry them away into solution, reducing what remains of the difficulty. It’s the undefined problem which vaguely looms so large as to seem overwhelming and imponderable.
- Go to the Directory and pick one of the methods described therein that it links to. Choose which method to try using with the chosen question or problem.
- Follow the specific steps of that chosen method, to discover within your own perceptions fresh understandings and an ingenious answer or solution to the topic that you are addressing. Expect and intend to be surprised at what emerges as your experience and your answer. This gives your mind “permission” to show you what you hadn’t been consciously aware of before. I have been a member of too many discussion groups which, while entertaining, never solved anything because they were too comfortable just sitting back and hurling their fixed opinions at each other. For nearly everyone, and for nearly everything, what we expect the answer to be is the main thing preventing us from seeing the real answer.
- Follow then these instructions — they go with any other method of creative problem-solving (there are hundreds of such methods!) and go a long way to helping insure accuracy of your results.
Working with an external focus such as a friend, a spouse, or, in a pinch, an audio recorder and note pad as your “live listener” to whom to describe your perceptions which arise at each step of your experience, does wonders for the range and power of your creative ingenuity and problem-solving.
Given the right tools, YOU are more than a match for almost any problem, challenge, opportunity or question you might ever encounter. You are the world expert on your own problems, the best person to call upon in tackling them. These are a few of the right tools. And: You are brighter than you think.
As tools with which to figure things out, methods for creative problem-solving are also great for teaching, training, and learning-with-understanding. 3 Easy Tactics To Use In Your Classroom illustrates how even the simplest creative problem-solving techniques can easily be used to better than double the rate, range and quality of intellectual progress. Some validity for these techniques may be inferred from these test results.
In short—
To get started, line up for handy use-in-flow, for your adventure today in breakthrough solution-finding, the following:
- These instructions
- A live listener-partner to whom to describe perceptions and experiences.
- A notepad or audio recorder for that same purpose and to record and keep track.
- The Directory, which for handy use you might want to print out.
- For handy use, the instructions for whichever solution-finding method you decide to use —— good to start with are Windtunnel for group use; or for solo, personal, individual use, Freenoting can be recommended.
- The general instructions and guidance from Best Answer, which you might also want to print out for easier, handier use.
- You might also want to print out for handy use the instructions for either Crab Apple or DEAM, either one of which makes an excellent follow-up “second whammy” to obtain additional new insights on the problem-situation you have just Freenoted or Windtunneled.
Find a comfortable place in which you can write, and set aside 30-50 uninterrupted minutes in which to astonish yourself.