Creativity and Problem Solving (The Brian Tracy Success Library)

Brian Tracy

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780814433171
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Decision Making
• Index: Business

The hallmark of an exceptional career is the ability to devise innovative solutions for work challenges. Therefore, creative thinking skills are vital for your professional advancement.

Recent research has revealed a direct causality between ideas and profitability, which means that in today's competitive and technology-rich work environment, the most crucial element separating an extraordinary career from an ordinary one is creative thinking skills.

As one of the world's premiere success experts, Brian Tracy knows anyone can become more creative by practicing with a few helpful tools. This concise, easy-to-read book guides you to immediately begin generating a stream of productive ideas.

In Creativity & Problem Solving, Tracy reveals 21 proven techniques that will help you:

• Stimulate the three primary triggers to creativity
• Inspire a creative mindset in staff through recognition, rewards, and environment
• Use methods to solve problems, improve systems, devise new products, and come up with fresh, exciting marketing angles
• Ask focused questions to generate elegant solutions
• Understand the difference between mechanical and adaptive thinking
• Rigorously evaluate new ideas without shutting down the creative impulse

Containing mind-stimulating exercises and down-to-earth strategies, Creativity & Problem Solving will help you tap into the root source of their own intuitive genius--and gain the winning edge they've been missing all this time.

ONE

The Root Sources of Creativity

Everyone is creative. Creativity is a natural, spontaneous characteristic of positive individuals with high self-esteem. Companies that create a positive working environment receive a steady flow of ideas from everyone on the staff.

What are the factors that largely determine your creativity? There are three. The first is your past experiences. What has happened to you in the past has a major effect on determining how creative you are in the present.

Influence of the Past

It seems that creative people, because of their backgrounds, consider themselves to be highly creative. Generating ideas is normal and natural for them.

Uncreative people, on the other hand, have often had negative environments, starting in childhood and continuing through different jobs, where they have generally accepted that they are not particularly creative at all. Even when they have good ideas, which they often do, they will reject or ignore the ideas, believing that if they are the source, the ideas can’t be any good.

When you work (or have worked) for a company where your ideas are encouraged and stimulated, where your bosses and coworkers treat your ideas with respect and interest, you will feel yourself to be more creative in your job.

Power of the Present

The second factor that determines your creativity is your current situation. Is there a lot of encouragement for new ideas in your workplace? Do people laugh together and get involved in discussing ideas together, or are your ideas ridiculed and criticized?

In the 1990s, Eastman Kodak was a $60 billion company with 140,000 employees. It dominated the world of film, as it had for many decades. Then, after many years of work, the scientists and researchers at Eastman Kodak discovered a new process called “digital photography” that did not require the medium of film to take and print photographs. When they took this discovery to their senior managers, they were roundly criticized and told, “This idea is no good; Kodak is a film company and this technology does not require film.”

They were sent back to their offices and laboratories and told to forget about this new breakthrough technology. The rest is history. Within a few years, the Japanese camera manufacturers leaped all over the idea of digital photography, bringing out new digital cameras one after another, and soon, Kodak was finished.

The Person You See

The third factor that determines your creativity is your self-image. Do you consider yourself to be a creative person? Do you see yourself as being highly creative, or not? Many studies indicate that 95 percent of people demonstrate the potential to perform at high levels of creativity. The work done by Howard Gardner at Harvard University concluded that there are several different ways of thinking, and that each person is a potential genius in at least one area. What this means is that the key to unlocking your creativity is to begin to think of yourself as a highly creative person.

The Inner Game

Timothy Gallwey, in his book The Inner Game of Golf, teaches that the way to become a better golfer is to imagine that you are already a top golfer and to play golf as if you were already at championship levels. The very act of thinking about yourself as an excellent golfer improves your golf swing and your drive and putting almost immediately.

By the same token, the way to increase your creativity is to imagine that you are already a highly creative person. Repeat to yourself, over and over, “I’m a genius! I’m a genius! I’m a genius!”

Visualize and imagine yourself as a highly creative person. Imagine that you are so creative that there is no problem in your world that you cannot solve by using your creative mind. Imagine that there is no goal that you cannot achieve by developing ideas for its accomplishment. Imagine that there is no obstacle that you cannot overcome when you apply your creative mind, like a laser beam cutting through steel, to remove the obstacle.

The good news is that everybody is inherently creative. Creativity is a tool provided by nature to man to ensure survival, and to deal with the inevitable problems and challenges of daily life. The only difference is that some people use a lot of their inborn creativity, and some people use very little.

ACTION EXERCISES

1. Identify your biggest single goal in life today. What is it, and what one action could you take immediately to move a step closer to that goal?

2. Identify the biggest problem or obstacle standing between you and your most important goal. What one action could you take immediately to solve that problem or remove that obstacle?

TWO

Three Triggers to Creativity

Sometimes people tell me that they do not feel they are particularly creative. I assure them that they are born with vastly more creativity than they could ever use. Their job is to stir up and unlock their inherent creativity.

I like to use this illustration: Imagine that you have poured yourself a cup of coffee and put sugar in it. You then put the cup to your lips, but the coffee still tastes plain and unsweetened. What has happened? The obvious answer is that you forgot to stir the coffee in the cup and mix the sugar throughout the drink.

Your creativity is very much the same. It is like the sugar at the bottom of the cup of coffee. It needs to be stirred up so that it dissolves and spreads through the entire cup of coffee.

The Three Factors

Like stirring the sugar in the coffee, your creativity is naturally stirred up by three factors, all of which are under your control.

INTENSELY DESIRED GOALS

The greater clarity you have about what it is you really want and the more positive and excited you are about achieving that goal, the more creative you will be, and the more ideas you will come up with. The more you want something, the more likely it is you’ll find creative ways to accomplish it. This is why it is said that “there are no noncreative people, just those without goals that they want badly enough.”

Determine the one goal that, if you achieved it, would have the greatest positive impact on your life. Write it down clearly on paper so that a child could understand your goal. This very action of deciding what you want more than anything else will almost instantly trigger ideas for actions that you could take to achieve that goal.

PRESSING PROBLEMS

These are some of the greatest stimulants of all leading to greater creativity. If there is a problem or an obstacle that is stopping you from achieving something that is important to you, you will be amazed at how creative you can become in your ability to remove it.

Clarity is essential to creative thinking. Here is a way of gaining greater clarity: First, decide on your goal or objective. What is it that you really want in a particular area of your life? Then ask, “Why aren’t I already at this goal or objective? Why haven’t I already achieved this goal?”

Then ask, “Of all the reasons why I have not yet achieved my goal, what is the biggest and most important reason?”

Once you have identified the biggest single obstacle or difficulty that is holding you back from achieving your most important goal, your mind will start generating idea after idea to solve that problem or remove that obstacle.

FOCUSED QUESTIONS

Your ability to ask yourself, and others, questions that force you to think deeply about your situation is a major stimulus to creativity. In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins says that a mark of great companies is that the executives are willing to ask themselves the “brutal questions” that force them to think deeply about their situation.

Peter Drucker is famous for saying, “I am not a consultant. I am an insultant. I do not give answers; I merely ask people the hard questions they need to consider to find their own answers.”

Throughout this book, you will learn a series of questions that you can ask and answer to unlock more of your creativity and allow you to penetrate to the core of a subject. The more precise and focused the questions you use, the more rapidly your creative reflexes operate to generate workable answers.

Test Your Assumptions

One of the most powerful ways to trigger creativity is for you to test your assumptions continually. Be sure that the goals, problems, and questions that you are generating are the real ones for your life and situation. It does you no good to focus on the wrong goals or on the wrong problems.

Continually ask yourself, “What are my assumptions?” Remember, many of your assumptions about your life, work, customers, money, the market, and other people are wrong or partially wrong. Sometimes they are completely wrong.

What are your obvious assumptions? What are your hidden or unconscious assumptions? And most of all, what if your most cherished assumptions were wrong?

False assumptions lie at the root of every failure. Whenever you are facing problems, resistance, or difficulties, ask yourself, “What are my assumptions? What if my assumptions are wrong?”

ACTION EXERCISES

1. What one goal, if you achieved it, would have the greatest positive impact on your career or business?

2. What major assumption are you making in your business or personal life that, if it turned out not to be true, would require you to do something completely different?

THREE

The Mindstorming Method

Do you remember the metaphor of stirring up the sugar in the coffee? You have enormous reserves of creativity that you can stir up and stimulate by using a variety of techniques. The Mindstorming method is one of them.

According to brain expert Tony Buzan, your brain has about 100 billion cells, each of which is connected directly and indirectly via ganglia and dendrites to approximately 20,000 other cells. Mathematically this means that the number of ideas or thoughts that you can generate is 100 billion to the 20,000th power, the equivalent of the number one followed by eight pages of zeros, line by line. The number of thoughts that you can think is greater than the number of molecules in the known universe. You are a potential genius!

Pumping Mental Iron

Mindstorming is one of the most powerful ways ever discovered to creatively solve problems and achieve goals. It is a way of using focused questions for concentrating the power of your mind on a single question. In my experience, more people have become wealthy and successful using this simple method than any other type of creative thinking technique ever developed. In our seminars we call it “the 20 Idea Method.”

The reason this method is so powerful is because it is so simple.

First, take a sheet of paper and write your most pressing problem or goal at the top of the page in the form of a question. For example, if your goal is to double your sales and profitability over the next two years, your question would be:

What can we do to double our sales and profitability in the next twenty-four months?

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