Problem Statements | Carefully crafting your problem statement and then revisiting it and changing it if required. Different framing of the same problem tends to lead to dramatically different solutions. |
Preserving Ambiguity | Being careful not to adopt assumptions too early whereby you may sacrifice open creativity in favor of familiarity and certainty. |
Thought Experiment | Developing hypothetical situations that are intuitive and analogous to far more complex problems. A means of simplifying the very complex. |
First Principles | Working from first principles -- foundational rules with broad explanatory power that you hold to be true. |
Analogical Reasoning | Using analogies to reframe problems, solutions or concepts. |
Brainstorming | Freely offering ideas without constraint or validation. |
Reverse Brainstorming | Brainstorming all the ways an idea or plan could fail. |
Free Writing | Brainstorming in full sentence and paragraph form for some time without stopping. |
Improvisation | A tradition of collaboratively composing a story, song or creative work in an additive way without ever rejecting or validating the ideas of others. This typically goes off on a wild tangent and is used to break teams out of static modes of thinking. |
Role-playing | Acting out parts e.g. customers with different motivations. |
Mind Mapping | Drawing your ideas about a topic as a tree of concepts. |
Motley Crew Principle | The observation that creative efforts such as a movie production benefit from the contributions of people with diverse backgrounds, ways of thinking and experiences. |
Charrette | A charrette is an intensive and potentially long period of group work in a room together until something is completed. This extends from design traditions for delivering assignments and projects. |
Creative Tension | Creative tension a culture that sacrifices group harmony for the purposes of creativity. For example, strongly arguing as a group as opposed to being positive all the time. |
Creative Direction | Granting a person creative control who has demonstrated a talent for delivering creative results. It is rare for group decisions to be creative as they reflect the social compromises of a group. |
Journaling | Writing down every idea you have in case you want to go back to it. A very common technique in creative industries such as music whereby song writers commonly keep a journal. |
Creativity of Constraints | Where assumptions tend to be the enemy of creativity, constraints can be productive where they force you to be ambitious. For example, a low budget that forces a team to find a simple and direct solution to a problem. |
Perspective Switching | Looking at things from different perspectives such as marketing, operational, customer, regulator and competitor views of the same strategy. |
Cognitive Switching | Using different modes of thinking such as logical, emotional and traditional thinking to view a problem in different ways. |
Design Thinking | Solving problems by designing things. |
Systems Thinking | Trying to consider the entire impact of things including unintended consequences of change to complex systems. |
Empathy Training | Training that puts you in the shoes of someone else to try to understand how things are for them. Often designed to break static thinking and assumptions. |
Creative Intuition | The observation that ideas appear to simply pop into your mind after a long period of thinking about a problem. This calls for taking your time and letting your mind work on a problem for a while. |
Creative Idealism | Idealism is the theory that ideas shape reality and not the other way around. This can be a useful way to think when generating ideas. |
Defensive Pessimism | |
Experiments | Designing and conducting carefully controlled tests to validate ideas and discover new knowledge. |
Root Cause Analysis | Examining cause and effect to distinguish between symptoms and the root cause of a problem. |
5 Whys | Asking why five times in succession to dig deeper into a concept or issue. |
Challenging Assumptions | The process of identifying and challenging assumptions including your own. |
Assumption Reversal | Write down all your assumptions including those that feel obvious and unshakable then reverse each assumption to examine the impact. |
SWOT Analysis | Listing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. A popular way to examine your current strategic position. |
Sanity Check | Challenging your decisions, strategies and plans with the question -- does this make any sense whatsoever? |
