Introduction

• General
  • Introduction
  • Definition

Topics

• Resources
• General

• Techniques
  • The bigger view
  • Change your character
  • Challenge current thinking
  • Confine the problem
  • Change the scene
  • Combining known ideas
  • Reverse thinking
  • Circumvent the issue
  • Lateral thinking
  • Logical approach
  • Aim for less
  • Multiple tools

• General principles
• Personnel and the meeting
• Prepare properly
• The meeting process
• The brainstorm process
• Simple example
• Managing the meeting process
• Assessing ideas
• Implementing ideas

General principles

Problems never end

There is never going to be a point in your life that you don’t have to solve some sort of problem.
Many will be relatively straight forward to solve and result in simple and quick remedies.
Some will require a lot of thought and perhaps a lot of resources and time.

For those more complex issues or when you are looking for an innovative edge it is a good idea to have quite a few tools in you problem solving armoury.
If you are solving a problem all by yourself it is usually much easier to implement it and accept the responsibility for its success or failure.
When you solve problems as a group putting the solution into operation may be a little trickier.

Once you arrive at a solution what happens next?
Many problem solving activities are met with a lot of scepticism for all sorts of reasons.
Will the plan ever be implemented and to what degree?
On reflection is the solution as good as you thought it was when it was first derived?

In order to make the problem solving process and its implementation go as smoothly as possible you need a plan.
Hopefully, generic so that you can put it into place on any occasion.