INNOVATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING
Five routes to more innovative problem solving
Tricky
problems must be shaped before they can be solved. To start that process, and
stimulate novel thinking, leaders should look through multiple lenses.
What is the article
about?
Business leaders are
operating in an era when forces such as technological change and the historic
rebalancing of global economic activity from developed to emerging markets have
made the problems increasingly complex, the tempo faster, the markets more
volatile, and the stakes higher. The number of variables at play can be
enormous, and free-flowing information encourages competition, placing an
ever-greater premium on developing innovative, unique solutions.
This article presents an
approach for doing just that. How? By using what we call flexible objects for
generating novel solutions, or flexons, which provide a way of shaping
difficult problems to reveal innovative solutions that would otherwise remain
hidden.
Flexons substitute for the
wisdom and experience of a group of diverse, highly educated experts
This approach can be useful
in a wide range of situations and at any level of analysis, from individuals to
groups to organizations to industries.
The
five flexons are: Networks flexon, Evolutionary flexon, Decision-agent flexon,
System-dynamics flexon and Information-processing flexon.
In short,
Flexons help turn chaos into
order by representing ambiguous situations and predicaments as well-defined,
analyzable problems of prediction and optimization. They allow us to move up
and down between different levels of detail to consider situations in all their
complexity. And, perhaps most important, flexons allow us to bring diversity inside
the head of the problem solver, offering more opportunities to discover
counterintuitive insights, innovative options, and unexpected sources of
competitive advantage.
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