Creative Thinking: Innovative Problem Solving

It is sometimes amazing that companies keep doing things the same old way when a better, sometimes simpler and cheaper way can be had with a little creative thinking. Innovative problem solving is very much needed in today’s fast-paced workplace.

“There’s little that can be said with certainty about the future except this: sometime over the next decade your company will be challenged to change in a way for which there is no precedent.” 

    — Gary Hamel in The Future of Management

How do you plan for the future of your business, when there is a very real possibility that the future will bear no resemblance to the present or the past? At the current speed of change, leaders who have been trained for years to forecast will find that a forecast based on past trends will be of little use in the unprecedented future. A new set of skills and a new mindset will be necessary to deal with this challenge.

Leaders – and in fact, everyone in the business – must learn to free their minds from the assumptions and paradigms that limit their vision of the future. They must re-learn how to use their imagination in thinking about the future, even though this is counter to their years of learning to think only with verifiable (past) data.  They must learn to look at problems as part of the whole system in order to see the intricate web of underlying forces that must be addressed to solve problems holistically.  And they must learn to anticipate the unexpected consequences of their decisions in a future that may be nothing like the familiar present.

Creative Thinking strengthens the creative thinking skills of your leaders helps your business achieve important benefits:

• Flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing conditions
• Fresh perspectives on business strategies and planning for the future
• Innovative, cost-saving improvements to processes and products
• Creative and lasting solutions to persistent problems

Creative Thinking Training highlights:

• How to break free of paradigms (mindsets) that limit your vision
• How to use Creative Thinking tools
• Systems thinking to solve problems holistically
• Future scenarios to anticipate the future
• 6 thinking styles to gain new perspective
• Strategic maps to “see” with new eyes
• Applying Creative Thinking to real challenges facing your business
• Building creative thinking into the culture

Creative Thinking Methodology

Participants in Creative Thinking spend most of their workshop time in hands-on practices with coaching and feedback. They gain insight and skills through customized exercises, case studies, and simulations.

Creative Thinking Customized Solutions

To ensure that training is not just an “event,” but instead produces enduring results, we customize Creative Thinking to fit your unique situation, business strategy, culture, and people.  After discussion with you and other experts within your organization, we select the emphasis, specific skills to be developed, key learning points, exercises, and case studies for practice to create a solution tailored just for you.

Creative Thinking Applications

The following are some of the ways our clients have used custom versions of Creative Thinking:

• To foster a more innovative, forward thinking culture able to respond to rapid changes in the marketplace
• To support the development of a new, more effective sales strategy
• To enable leaders to solve persistent problems
• To help an older more traditional organization shake off bureaucracy and shift to a more flexible, responsive, innovative culture
• To help develop creative thinking approaches in project work teams faced with solving new business challenges
• To respond to the impact of technology on business processes

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