Creative Problem Solving
Writing this newsletter is the most fun I have each week.
Meeting new people, Tweeting and sharing Daily Creativity Dose is generally enjoyable, but being able to spend time processing my thoughts about Creativity absolutely fills my passion bucket.
So thank you for taking the time to read these thoughts each week. I want this to be a resource you learn from and feel comfortable sharing with other people.
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ALSO, I want to meet you.
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Now...Let's dive into The Creativity In You!
In 2021, I managed a digital product for a company that did interior design. They were attempting to create a marketplace for interior designers and architects, suppliers and manufacturers to sell their wares before I was brought on board for the project. I started off by asking the founder and developer what motivated them to create such a platform. From their feedback, it appears that both have sincere presumptions like; "The emergence of covid-19 as open up the e-commerce space and most shopping is now done online. The founder added that because she has been working in the interior design industry for more than 20 years, she is quite knowledgeable about the market." As a strategic designer one of my job is to validate assumptions instead of building on it. Since the majority of the time what we believe to be the problem is not the real problem, design strategy helps in identifying what the underlying issue is. I therefore sought to validate their assumptions as well as identify the actual problem that needed to be solved.
I conducted a User Experience Research. Mapped out the stakeholders involved, prepared my interview and went ahead to Interview about 15 of them. while trying to match patterns and synthesize my findings for Insights, things started getting clearer. "The stakeholders don't trust a Nigerian based Marketplace to deliver the kind of quality they wanted. Other Marketplace rendering similar service are having sales issue due to low patronage. The users will prefer a platform that allows them Socialize, network and do business." I was able to understand the issue we should be addressing after using some of my frameworks to map out personas, customer profile, and value map. I then made a recommendation with a product vision of creating a community that allows users to network (via a forum), source for other businesses within the industry (by gathering business data and empowering the search through an AI-enabled chatbot), and subsequently scale by including a marketplace feature once a certain amount of trust has been established and we can observe how well the metrics performance is after the Q3 of launch.
I shared more Insights into my practice as a strategic designer and my design journey on 'The Design Strategy Podcast' hosted by Josephine Scholtes a 'UX Consultant at Microsoft' based in Netherlands. Listen to my episode here.
What I did basically is to inform my knowledge with the right Insights; just like I explained in 'Creative Thinking' about combining ideas or elements that already exist and birth a valuable/novel idea in the process. This is the approach to Creative Problem Solving. The first step to remedying any problem is to acknowledge it. Problems present opportunities because they draw attention to areas where our organization, the system, and ourselves need improvement. Once these areas are recognized, they may be addressed, strengthening our relationships, our work, and the system as a whole. In the words of Winston Churchill, never let a good crisis go to waste. As a strategic designer how I solve business challenges is by deploying strategic and design thinking skills. I use a set of methodologies and tools from design, management, and social sciences to generate innovative solutions that are desirable (human), feasible (technology, operations, systems) and viable (business impact, profitability, sustainability) solving the challenges of both individuals and organizations.
Amy E. Herman shared in her book titled "Fixed" that Problem-solving is a critical survival skill because things do frequently go wrong. Working through problems is critical for productivity, profit, and peace. Our problem-solving skills, however, have been shortcircuited by our complicated, technology-reliant world. For the first time in human history, many of us share the same best friends: Siri and Alexa. We’ve become increasingly reliant on artificial intelligence, even to fuel our imaginations. The downside to the internet’s speed at spitting up answers, however, is that we have allowed our own reasoning skills to be dulled or underdeveloped. Why learn how to fix something when Google can do it. Unfortunately, calamity doesn’t always fit in a search bar. As Murphy’s Law and even the Bible assure us, things will go wrong. And increasingly in our modern, perilous world, the issues that emerge are subtle, laced in subtext, or teeter on the tip of a slippery slope—all attributes that require a human touch to solve. As said humans, we must not only be able to address the problems that arise across all professions and walks of life, we must also be able to solve them. Before they drown, damn, or destroy us. Thankfully, problem-solving is a skill that can be learned. Unfortunately, it’s not often taught.
If we want to become experts at solving problems, we must first understand our own internal strengths and weaknesses. This will allow us to account for them in advance and choose what will and won't work to solve the problem. We can only get over our biases after acknowledging and challenging them.
I will next share on how to listen to ideas.