‘There is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come.’

VICTOR HUGO

The pub is packed. The bar is four deep, all elbows and attitude. You just want to get served and get back to your friends, a.s.a.p. Ideally, before someone nicks your chair.

But there’s a problem. You’ve ordered three pints of Guinness.

The problem with Guinness is, it takes two minutes to pour a pint. You have to put some in (at a 45-degree angle), let it settle, then fill the rest up. What a pain. Compared to a pint of lager (or quicker still, a bottle of lager), it’s something of a laggard.

Which rather puts people off. So if you’re Diageo (the owner of Guinness), what do you do? How do you solve the problem of it taking a long time to pour?

By shifting perceptions. Instead of trying to develop ‘Instant Guinness’, they just position its slowness as a positive rather than a negative. With the slogan ‘Good things come to those who wait’. Backed up with brilliant advertising like the Surfer TV ad, voted ‘Best ad of all time’ by the public in a survey by the Sunday Times and Channel 4.

A simple, surprising and elegant solution to a significant disadvantage Guinness appeared to have, compared to the competition. Now you’re waiting at the bar not because Guinness is annoyingly slow. But because it’s fantastically good, and worth waiting for.

As Winston Churchill said: ‘We have no money, we shall have to think.’

And that’s what this book is all about.

Why me

I studied psychology at university, which gave me a lifelong interest in the way the mind works. From optical illusions to cognitive biases to pattern recognition to the way our memory stores information, there’s a lot in the popular psychology field to intrigue and inform without needing a NASA-sized brain to understand all the really clever stuff.

Then in my career I went on to become the creative director at several advertising and marketing agencies. Which is often all about creative problem solving – whether that problem is something that might seem pretty minor (like coming up with a witty slogan for an ad campaign), or something a bit more meaty (like how to reposition brand x, sell more of product y, or get customers to understand the value of service z). Whatever the problem, when you’re a creative director part of the job is coming up with creative solutions.

So over the years I read about, or discovered, or developed, lots of different approaches for coming up with creative answers to challenging briefs.

And I realised that although what I was doing was ‘being creative’, I was also solving problems – and finding interesting ways to solve those problems. Because that’s all a brief is, really: a problem in need of solving. A problem that can be solved more spectacularly with creative thinking.

Then I started doing the occasional problem-solving session with clients here and there, where I’d talk about how these creative thinking principles could work for them too, to solve real business problems (or seize on real business opportunities).

Refining those principles, using them ‘in the real world’ and seeing some tremendous success come from them – as well as recognising where other companies might have used similar approaches to achieve their success – they became the 12 tools in this book. Thinking tools with a creative pedigree that many clients have found a refreshingly energising, effective and jargon-free method for making leaps forward.

I hope that after reading the book you’ll feel the same way.

Problems not puzzles

There are business problems that can be fixed with hard work, study and iteration. For the sake of distinction, let me call them puzzles. I could liken them to your car breaking down. Why has it stopped working? You know it can work – it just was, a moment ago. But now some part (or parts) of it has come loose or broken or got misaligned or overheated or worn out or run out of some vital fluid.

It’s a puzzle: with some mechanical expertise (like that of, say, a mechanic) and a little time, the issue can be found. And then simply, precisely, perfectly fixed. A new spark plug (or whatever) and you’re back on the open road, belting out Bat Out of Hell and wondering how on earth the appalling driver in front of you ever passed their test.

But many more business problems are not like that. There is no definite, logical, knowable answer. There are too many variables, too many unknowns and just too many interactions to be able to draw it all out like an equation and deduce that if you double x and halve y you’ll achieve z.

This book is for all of those problems. All the ones beyond simple analysis and the (often misplaced) comfort of logic.

And that’s important, because puzzles that can be solved through study and iteration are already being solved. All the time. By you and by your competitors. It’s vital work, of course it is, but because those puzzles are solvable just by rigorous effort, and because their solutions appear risk-free (since they are, in theory, provable), everyone’s doing them – and you’ll never get ahead by just following the herd.

The 12 tools you’ll read about are for bigger, messier, newer problems. Ones for which there doesn’t seem to be a logical, provable answer. Ones which call for a bold leap, not a timid tiptoe.

Problems and opportunities

Despite the name, you don’t have to use The Creative Problem Solver just for solving problems. After all, ‘problem solving’ suggests something has to go wrong before you act. There needs to be a problem to solve.

Which can mean you’re spending your most creative time on fighting fires, not blazing new trails. And that can cost businesses a fortune – as the very best, most innovative and exciting tools for solving problems can also be excellent at helping you maximise opportunities.

In other words, the thinking tools that could have helped BP come up with more innovative and efficient ways to clean up the Deepwater Horizon oil spill could also have been the tools Apple used to develop the iPhone – a phone without physical keys at a time when the notion seemed ludicrous to the competition.

Sometimes we’ll look at how a tool can be used for innovation as well as for problem solving, but not every time as that might get rather repetitious. So just have in your mind that most of the tools can be employed for seizing opportunities as well as solving business issues. In fact, in many cases solving the issue creates the opportunity.

How to use this book

The Creative Problem Solver is divided into three parts. Personally I’d suggest that you read the whole thing, lightly and without any great effort, then when you’re ready, go back to Part II, Innovation, and use it as needed during your problem-solving/opportunity-seizing sessions.

Overall, the idea is that while your problems might be difficult, the tools to solve them needn’t be. You want to be able to get going as quickly and easily as possible: this book is set up for you to do just that.

Part I gives an insight into problem solving. The way our brains work, finding patterns, relying on past experiences, getting ‘stuck in a rut’ and how that can hold us back. It sets the scene for what follows.

Part II is the heart of the book. The 12 tools you need to meet big business challenges head on and seize upon your greatest opportunities. Each tool is simply explained, step-by-step, showcased with a business example and highlighted with a visual aid to use in your sessions.

And each tool has been written to be intuitive and energising, not process-heavy and wearying. As Elon Musk, billionaire co-founder of Tesla Motors and PayPal, says: ‘I don’t believe in process. The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine.’

Part III explores how to run a brainstorming session successfully.

At times you may be working alone – and these tools will help with your solo sessions. But you’ll probably be doing much of the work as part of a team. And that will probably include a brainstorm of some kind (or ‘mind shower’, as some people call them for reasons I don’t quite understand). Often I’ll use the term ‘session’ to describe your group ideation (mainly because I hate the word ideation). But sometimes I’ll say ‘brainstorm’, just because – while we all know traditional brainstorming can be flawed – it’s an accepted term that doesn’t look likely to go away anytime soon.

Anyway, in Part III we’ll look at how to run those sessions successfully – we’ll investigate what ‘good brainstorming’ looks like.

That will also include the background work you might want to do, how to get everyone working together, even how to use a flipchart (you’d be amazed how often potentially great brainstorm sessions are rendered useless by poor flipchart discipline).

We’ll also look at how to take the great solutions you’ve come up with and help ensure they get off the flipchart, into the boardroom and then into the real world.

More at www.thinking-tools.co.uk

The pages of this book are 216 x 138mm. Which means you’ll have to press the enlarge button a fair few times if you want to photocopy the visuals that accompany each thinking tool for your brainstorming sessions.

Alternatively there’s a microsite at www.thinking-tools.co.uk. It has all of the visuals (each with a description) and a couple of other useful printouts so it’s easier to get them the size you need to stick up somewhere prominent in your sessions. They also have white backgrounds to save on toner.