What are Creative Problems?

Principles of creativity > Creative Problems

Recognizing creative problems | Creative solutions | See also

In or work and our lives today we are constantly faced with problems that we must solve in order to move forward. Many of these problems are relatively easy, providing a brief and interesting challenge, but hardly causing us to break sweat.

Other problems are more difficult, but with some serious analysis will yield to the application of a logical and structured discipline.

This leaves us with the slippery, knotty and downright cantankerous problems that somehow manage to elude the even the most well-informed analysis. This is the domain of Creative Problem Solving.

Recognizing creative problems

Creative problems have several recognizable attributes:

They do not succumb to logical methods.
There is no 'one right answer', although some may be more right than others.
There are still many wrong answers.
They are a bit like jokes--you often do not find out how good they really are until after you have tried them out.

Creative solutions

Creative solutions are more than ideas - they must work in the real world. A creative solution has three attributes:

It is new (otherwise it would not be creative).
It is useful, in that it solves the problem (otherwise it would not be a solution).
It is feasible, given the messy real world constraints like money and time.