Creative problem solving (CPS) is a way of solving problems or identifying opportunities when conventional thinking has failed. It encourages you to find fresh perspectives and come up with innovative solutions that help businesses bring innovative solutions to their customers. As a skill, creative problem-solving makes you more valuable to prospective organizations.
What is Creative problem solving
Creative problem-solving involves approaching a problem or a challenge in an inventive way. It is a process that goes beyond conventional approaches to find solutions to workflow problems, product innovation, or brand positioning and helps us come up with innovative solutions.
How to improve your creative problem-solving skills
When your job revolves around the ability to come up with solutions, then you need excellent creative problem-solving skills. Follow these steps to start improving your creative problem-solving skills.
- Use a strategic framework.
Creative problem-solving is a framework within itself. It involves gathering information and unbiased inputs, identifying relationships, developing solutions, and implementing solutions to a problem.
- Practice empathy
Empathy is a key element in emotional intelligence and will allow you to understand the viewpoints of customers, clients, and co-workers. Practicing creative empathy will result in more valuable, creative solutions to problems that might arise.
- Work on your self-awareness
The first step to becoming more creative and innovative is to become self-aware and acknowledge the limitations of our thought processes when it comes to creativity. Know what you’re capable of and act upon it once you have this understanding.
- Expand your knowledge
Become an expert in your field and you’ll understand every angle of a problem. The more you know, the more you’ll be able to consider different ways of exploring solutions to problems. You can even end up with the skill to identify issues before they arise.
- Consider your past experiences.
Past experiences give you a unique perspective that you can apply with critical thought. Ask yourself if you’ve ever been in a situation similar to the one you may be currently experiencing in your workplace, recall how the situation ended, and determine what you can do to achieve similar or better results.
- Collaborate with others
This is one of the best ways of conjuring creative solutions, as well as identifying potentially obvious solutions that may not have been tried before.
Conclusion
Creative problem-solving skills are more important now than they’ve ever been before. Employers will be on the lookout for any potential employee who can demonstrate their creative problem-solving skills, as well as those who also have proven critical thinking skills and problem-solving skills.
Improving your knowledge and understanding in these two areas can make a huge difference to how you work, and how you collaborate with others as well. Now more than ever, teamwork is incredibly important in the modern workplace.