Bertrand Russell, the philosopher and mathematician, once said, "In all the creative work I have done, what has come first is a problem, a puzzle involving discomfort. Then comes the concentrated voluntary application entailing great effort. After this is a period without conscious thought. And finally, a solution."
Russell attacked the logic of creative problem-solving and tried, in his teachings and writings, to break the process down into four distinct steps. His reasoning is still valid today.
Preparation-The first step
The first thing you have to do with a problem is recognise it and then define it. That might not be as easy as it sounds. Recognition of a problem requires that you are alert and sensitive to what's happening around you.
For example, let's say you're in charge of marketing a successful product. Sales and profits are great. But your most recent studies indicate that market saturation is fast approaching, accompanied by over-capacity and falling prices. This is a potential problem that you have to be aware of now, because if you wait too long before acting, the problem may overtake you and your company. That's an example of being sensitive to potential troubles.
Defining a problem is also essential. You might be wasting valuable time and money trying to stop employee turnover by increasing salaries and giving out bonuses. If your solutions don't work, you may have misdiagnosed the original problem of turnover. Maybe employee compensation isn't the real problem, but working conditions are.
Your faulty definition of the problem has only added to the problem. Ask yourself: "Is this really what's wrong? How else could I define the problem at hand?"
Digestion-The second step
Only rarely will a solution be evident immediately after you have defined the situation In fact, more often than not, the problem will appear to be insoluble.
Don't struggle impatiently with the problem. Study it for a while. Examine it from various angles. Look at alternative approaches. Digestion really means breaking the problem into smaller parts. Charles Kettering, one of America's most famous inventors and for years an executive at General Motors, once remarked: "The process of research is to pull the problem apart into its different elements, a great many of which you already know about. When you get it pulled apart, you can work on the things you don't know about."
Incubation-The third step
Use your unconscious mind to do some of the work for you when it comes to solving problems. Psychologists now recognise that the 'inner mind' is a vast territory where creative ideas can develop literally overnight.
The active (conscious) mind is full of 'mental censors' which block out possible solutions as being 'not practical enough' or 'impossible.' But your unconscious mind doesn't have these limitations; new solutions can appear at any time, day or night.
Let your mind wander at times. Don't restrict it to just 'practical' answers. Consider all possibilities that spring up.
Illumination-The fourth step
Solutions may develop within 10 minutes of starting to work on a problem or they might take as much as 10 months. But no matter how long it takes for the answer to appear, once it does, you have to be ready to creatively execute it.
First, treat all new solutions with a sense of respect. Every solution might be the best possible one, and might lead to even better solutions or applications.
If you feel your idea is a valuable one, try to retrace your steps to see how you came to that conclusion. Never throw away an idea. Today's idea might provide the answer to tomorrow's problem Robert Thompson, for example, invented the pneumatic tire in 1845, although there wasn't a widespread use for it until the automobile was introduced.