Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
16 Creative Decision
Making and Problem Solving
100 100
80
Percent
60
Count
20
0 0
r or
atc h s ing part s or n so ire pa rt ens t ed x
sc
r ou ng se
n se ew n s ain bo
Defect Pa
n
i t n t H
s
i s i
r
i ty ulty
o os
r oke
c ke d
o t p
Torn
Be M D Fa L B Cr
a N
Count 43 36 4 3 3 3 2 2 2 2
Percent 43.0 36.0 4.0 3.0 3.0 3.0 2.0 2.0 2.0 2.0
Cum % 43.0 79.0 83.0 86.0 89.0 92.0 94.0 96.0 98.0 100.0
Different Ways to Think (cont.)
There are five basic categories of ways to think:
4. Opposite thinking – the decision maker
takes the perspective of someone other than
himself.
5. Groupthink – an alternative way of thinking
that can be used to achieve group
involvement, e.g. idea generation and
brainstorming.
Intuition
Intuition is often identified as an important
element in creative decision making and
problem solving.
Managers who can harness their intuition can
often respond more quickly to a given
situation and apply both experience and
judgment.
Intuition
IN Marseilles, France, …a suspect on board a fishing
vessel was thought to be smuggling heroin.
Unfortunately, when the naval patrol boarded the
vessel, they could not find any drugs. As the naval
patrol prepared to depart, one officer noticed that the
boat’s concrete ballast was located in the front of the
ship rather than at its normal position in the center.
When the ballast was examined, the patrol
discovered that it was hollowed out and contained the
larges cache of heroin ever found. The intuition of
the naval officer helped solve the problem.
Barriers to Creativity
Self-constraining beliefs – the participant
makes the problem more difficult by
assuming certain constraining conditions that
do not exist.
Fears, beliefs, and stresses – people that fear
criticism or have strong beliefs may have
limited ability to be “free” and creative
Routines and rigidity – this may inhibit the
information gathering, interactions, and
incubation of thought that leads to creativity.
Creative Problem-Solving Techniques
Most techniques fit into four categories:
1. Serendipity – we cannot control this, but can
enhance its probability of occurring by
actively studying unexplained phenomena.
2. Free association – techniques in this
category, such as brainstorming, focus on
divergent thinking and creation of ideas
while deferring judgment on those ideas.
Creative Problem-Solving Techniques
(cont.)
Most techniques fit into four categories:
3. Structured relationships – new ideas are
generated by forcing together two or more
objects to produce new objects.
4. Group techniques – these enhance creativity
in multiparticipant problem-solving contexts.
Tools to Aid Brainstorming
This free association technique involves
gathering together a set of often-diverse
people to generate a long list of ideas about a
problem.
After this long list is generated, it is culled
down to manageable size, often with
surprisingly little effort.
Two commercial tools to aid in brainstorming
are IdeaFisher and GroupSystems.
A Dialogue from Ideocentics’ IdeaFisher
What qualifies a person to be a potential
customer? Young, professional, athletic and/or
fashion conscious, has purchasing power.