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<meta property="og:description" content="On 3rd to 5th of April, I was in the TUM kick-off seminar, and we explored creative problem solving to solve a personal problem of mine!">
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<h2 style="margin-left: -1em">2017</h2>
<ul class="list-unstyled">
<li>
<p class="date">07<sup>th</sup> April</p>
<a href="#">Solving problems with a creative approach:
A creative problem solving workshop</a></li>
</ul>
</section>
<article class="col-lg-10">
<h1>Solving problems with a creative approach:</h1>
<h3>A creative problem solving workshop</h3>
<img src="images/blog/07042017/TU-Kickoff-116.jpg" alt="" style="max-width: 100%; margin-bottom: 30px;">
<p>On 3rd to 5th of April, I was in the TUM kick-off seminar, essentially an intro-cum-warmup seminar that you must attend as a TUM doctoral student. In the seminar there were a few workshops on offer, and I went for <i><mark>Serious Creativity: Develop New Solutions in a Systematic Way.</mark></i> The main reason I chose this is that I explore art and creativity quite often, and already have explored some creativity techniques myself. So, it was quite interesting for me to build on that, and possibly make my creative workflow better. The course was provided by Daniel Barth, from <a href="https://www.creaffective.de/en/">creaffective</a>, and it was an exceptional experience, particularly for me. I got to explore and ascend to a new level of personal freedom, and it was at this point that I decided to write a blog post about this, albeit this my first blog entry.</p>
<h4>What is Creativity?</h4>
<p>Most of us think of creativity as an inherent talent. It is a very spontaneous, non-deterministic thing, that pops up in some of us better than others. In reality though, this is not necessarily true. In some instances it works that way, and some of us are indeed gifted, but creativity is actually a skill that can be pursued, learnt, and improved upon. Effort and creativity are strongly related, in that in the majority of instances you must apply the former to succeed at the latter. This is a central idea of this workshop, and the methods and tools to cultivate that are actually taught here. There has been significant research done on this idea, and there are a few standard practices and workflows available. In this course we got to familiarise ourselves with these methods and actually tried to apply them to solve an issue. The reason this was special to me, is that the issue was mine!</p>
<h4>Exploring and Defining a Problem</h4>
<p>So, first we got some introduction to creativity itself, attempted to define it and so on, then talked about a few key principles like convergent and divergent thinking, the base building block principle. I would talk about this later, but then we actually got to the main <q class= "colorquote">workflow</q>, shown below.
</p>
<img src="images/blog/07042017/workflow.svg" alt="Workflow" style="width: 60%;" class="center-block">
<p>So, this is a standard creative problem solving workflow, and the idea is to take up a problem and solve it, possibly in an iterative manner if needs be. There are multiple possible entry points, and you can adapt this to suit your needs, it’s just a standard guideline. For our workshop purposes, we needed a problem to solve, so the first part was to get one. Everyone was asked to first write down all their problems, personal or otherwise, and then chose one that they are happy to share with the group. The trick to this is to think in terms of <q class= "colorquote">I wish to...</q> or <q class= "colorquote">Wouldn't it be great if...</q> After some thinking, I could not find many problems, and all the ones that I could come up with were very personal and deeply psychological, like <q class= "colorquote">How do I clear my mind?</q> and so on. The only one that was somewhat relevant was wishing <q class= "colorquote">I could approach and communicate with people better</q>, and so I presented it to the group. Then there was a poll to decide which problem was relevant to everyone, you can see the poll board below, and my problem was chosen based on a tie-breaking poll.</p>
<img src="images/blog/07042017/TU-Kickoff-045.jpg" alt="" style="max-width: 80%" class="center-block">
<p>Now this had serious implications that I really was not aware of, or otherwise underestimated. Now I am the <em><q class= "colorquote">Topic Owner</q></em>, which means the entire group now focuses on and works to solve my problem. It is as if you become the focus of the system, and since the problem I posed had a psychological element in it, that meant serious psych eval, as I was soon to find out. I have been a very open person lately, and I have been less concerned about maintaining privacy - that is why I was comfortable to present such a topic, but I underestimated the depth of the issue.</p>
<h4>Assessing the Situation</h4>
<p>Now that we have a problem, its time to figure out what we know. Usually, this is best done by openly interviewing the topic owner. The topic owner has to provide the relevant data, that will define what we know about the situation. This is where serious psych eval comes in. I remember when Daniel asked me <q class= "colorquote">Why do you think this is a problem?</q>, I had a momentary flinch. I got the feeling that someone was peering into me for a very brief moment. It was fine for me though, so I got over it very quickly, quickly enough that nobody noticed, and I answered all the questions in very great detail. I tried to tell everything I knew, and that meant sharing some uncomfortable or embarrassing moments. This was a bit difficult, but soon I was in the free zone. This is the first time I have shared my psyche to a bunch of relative strangers and this was a very thrilling experience.</p>
<img src="images/blog/07042017/TU-Kickoff-052.jpg" alt="" style="max-width: 100%" class="center-block">
<p>I am not a very extroverted person by my nature. I am a closed book, and for a time, it was difficult for me to open up. In my school and also in my college life, I preferred to stay by my own. So, obviously, I am not a very talkative or connecting person, and I don’t have very good people skills, or at least I did not used to. I started to change that shortly before I graduated, and actually began thinking about cultivating people skills, and I observed people with good social skills. I was willing to learn that, and so slowly I started getting better at it. I felt that it gets easier with self-reflections and self-understanding. The clearer <em>YOU</em> are, the easier it is to talk to and be with other people. Over time, I could actually talk to pretty much anyone interested in having a conversation, and enjoyed it very much, I had gotten good at holding a conversation. The main secret of holding a conversation I find is to be open and have clarity of your own self. That actually makes the other person feel more comfortable and interested in the conversation. This is probably one reason I don’t find myself victim of awkward silences, because I can share myself well. This point directly ties into the sharing my psyche here, as after doing that I found everyone was comfortable. They asked me questions a bit later on, in the beginning only Daniel was doing that. This experience was very freeing for me, because I found that I can actually share my privacy to others. It made me very open and happy. There are deeper interpretations of this, but I will stop here!</p>
<p>So, we now have all data we need for our problem, so it is time to select the most relevant bits. This is what came out of this and as you can see the group picked the most relevant bits and then they were clustered, as you can see above, on the right. </p>
<h4>Formulating Challenges</h4>
<p>From this step, we move on to find a key question to try to answer, which will help us in solving the problem. First, we explore the possible <strong>OPEN</strong> questions we can ask, regarding the problem and data we have at hand, and then again, pick and choose based on importance and relevance to narrow it down.</p>
<img src="images/blog/07042017/TU-Kickoff-055.jpg" alt="" style="max-width: 60%" class="center-block">
<p>Do you see the pattern here? at every step we first explore all possible ideas. This is called the <q class= "colorquote">DIVERGENT</q> step. Here there are a few key rules to follow, namely</p>
<ul>
<li>Defer Judgement</li>
<li>Strive for quantity</li>
<li>Build on ideas</li>
<li>Strive for crazy ideas</li>
</ul>
<p>This would be obvious if you look at some of the suggested ideas.</p>
<p>The next step is then to <q class= "colorquote">CONVERGE</q>. Pick and choose a few important key ideas, based on a few criterias. Here also there are a few guiding principles, such as:</p>
<ul>
<li>Use positive judgement. There is no need to reject any ideas, just pick the ones that work and forget the rest.</li>
<li>Strive for originality</li>
</ul>
<p>This method is key to all the steps in a creative problem solving workflow.</p>
<h4>Exploring Ideas</h4>
<img src="images/blog/07042017/TU-Kickoff-050.jpg" alt="" style="max-width: 60%" class="center-block">
<p>Anyhow, now we have a key question that needs answering, and again we diverge for ideas. This is the fun part. There were about 67 ideas suggested in total, some really useful, some totally crazy. Some were related to others. The next part is to converge, but we used a special technique for this. All of us judged the ideas based on Ease of Implementation and Originality. That gave us three groups, ideas that are obvious and easy to implement, are the
<mark><strong>Now</strong></mark>
ideas. Ideas that are easy to implement, but not so obvious, are the
<mark><strong>Wow</strong></mark>
ideas, and ideas that are not so obvious, but are hard to implement are the
<mark><strong>How</strong></mark>
ideas. Then the ideas were clustered based on if they were related to each other, and I was asked to pick two ideas to go to the next stage, to be explored in a bit more detail.</p>
<img src="images/blog/07042017/TU-Kickoff-048.jpg" alt="" style="max-width: 100%" class="center-block">
<h4>Formulating Solutions and a Plan</h4>
<p>From here on out, for this particular exercise, things are difficult, because the details are very subjective. In any case, we explored the two ideas to come up with some detailed explanations of exactly what they meant and so on.</p>
<img src="images/blog/07042017/TU-Kickoff-059.jpg" alt="" style="max-width: 100%; margin-bottom: 30px;" class="center-block">
<img src="images/blog/07042017/TU-Kickoff-062.jpg" alt="" style="max-width: 60%" class="center-block">
<p>The next part is to formulate an action plan, in this case we just finished with one or two examples, writing this post was one of them!
So there you have it. Exploring a personal problem in a group to come up with a creative solution. Thank you everyone who was in the group for all the suggestions and inputs, it was very enjoyable and a learning experience at the same time. Last but not the least, special thanks to Mike for helping me with this post!
</p>
<p>This is my first blog post. Please leave your comments below on what you think!</p>
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