Typical stories of creativity and invention focus on finding novel ways to solve problems. James Dyson found a way to adapt the industrial cyclone to eliminate the bag in a vacuum cleaner. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque developed cubism as a technique for including several views of a scene in the same painting. The desktop operating system developed at Xerox PARC replaced computer commands with a spatial user interface.
How You Define the Problem Determines Whether You Solve It
New innovations can seem like they come out of nowhere. How could so many people have missed the solution to the problem for so long? And how in the world did the first person come up with that solution at all? In fact, most people who come up with creative solutions rely on a relatively straightforward method: finding a solution inside the collective memory of the people working on the problem. That is, someone working to solve the problem knows something that will help them find a solution — they just haven’t realized yet that they know it. When doing creative problem solving, the statement of the problem is the cue to memory. That is what reaches in to memory and draws out related information. In order to generate a variety of possible solutions to a problem, the problem solver (or group) can change the description of the problem in ways that lead new information to be drawn from memory. The most consistently creative people and groups are ones that find many different ways to describe the problem being solved.