My Thoughts
The Creative Problem Solving Mindset: Why Most Training Gets It Backwards
Related Reading: Check out these excellent resources on creative problem solving approaches and strategic thinking development | Problem Solving Skills Training | Creative Problem Solving Workshop
Three months ago, I watched a senior manager at a Perth mining company spend forty-five minutes explaining to his team why their quarterly targets were impossible to meet. The whole room nodded sympathetically. Classic Australian workplace politeness, right?
Wrong.
What nobody mentioned—including me, until I spoke up—was that they'd been using the same problem-solving framework for eight years. The same tired six-step process that treats every challenge like a broken photocopier. No wonder they felt stuck.
That's when it hit me: we've got creative problem solving completely arse-about. Most training programs teach you to follow steps. Real creative problem solving is about developing a mindset that deliberately breaks those steps.
The Backwards Logic of Traditional Problem Solving
Here's what drives me mental about most problem solving training approaches: they assume problems are linear. Step one leads to step two leads to breakthrough. Bollocks.
Creative problems are messy. They're emotional. They involve politics, egos, and that bloke from accounts who always says "we tried that before" without remembering why it failed.
The best problem solvers I know—and I've worked with hundreds across Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane—don't follow frameworks religiously. They use them as starting points, then improvise like jazz musicians.
Take Sarah from a Darwin logistics company. Faced with chronic staff turnover, she didn't conduct exit interviews or analyse data first. She grabbed a coffee with the newest team member and asked: "What's the weirdest thing about working here?"
Turned out, the office temperature was set to accommodate the server room, not humans. Nobody had thought to ask why everyone wore jumpers in the tropics. Simple fix. Sixty percent reduction in turnover within six months.
Why Your Brain Hates Creative Solutions
Most people think creativity is about having brilliant ideas in the shower. That's only half right.
The other half—the bit nobody talks about—is training your brain to notice when it's being lazy. Our minds love patterns. They love familiar solutions. They especially love solutions that worked last time, even when circumstances have completely changed.
I learned this the hard way managing a team of twenty-somethings fresh out of university. Bright kids, full of energy, terrible at creative problem solving. Know why? They'd been trained to find the "right" answer for twelve years of schooling.
Business doesn't have right answers. It has better answers, cheaper answers, faster answers, and politically acceptable answers. Sometimes you need all four simultaneously.
The creative problem solving mindset accepts this messiness. It asks different questions:
- What if the opposite were true?
- Who benefits from this problem existing?
- What would happen if we solved the wrong problem really well?
These aren't steps in a process. They're ways of thinking that become automatic with practice.
The Australian Advantage (And Why We Waste It)
Australians are naturally good at creative problem solving. We've had to be. Harsh environment, small population, long distances between everything. We improvise by necessity.
But somewhere between school and the corporate world, we lose that edge. We start following international best practices instead of trusting our instincts.
I once watched a team from a major Australian bank spend three weeks analysing customer complaints using a framework imported from Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, a local credit union solved the same problem by asking their customers directly: "What pisses you off most about banking?"
The credit union implemented five improvements in the time the bank was still defining their project scope.
This isn't anti-intellectual. I'm not suggesting we abandon rigorous thinking. I'm saying we need to balance analysis with action, especially when dealing with people problems.
Where Most Creative Problem Solving Training Goes Wrong
The training industry—and I include myself here—has overcomplicated creative problem solving. We've turned it into a product with certificates and assessments instead of a skill you develop through practice.
Real creative problem solving happens in three phases, not six or seven or twelve:
Mess around. Explore the problem without trying to solve it immediately. Ask weird questions. Talk to people who aren't supposed to know anything about it. Look at how completely different industries handle similar challenges.
Connect randomly. Force relationships between unrelated ideas. What would Uber do? How would your grandmother approach this? What if we had unlimited budget? What if we had no budget at all?
Test quickly. Don't aim for perfect solutions. Aim for interesting failures that teach you something new.
The beautiful thing about this approach is that it works for everything from workplace conflicts to supply chain disruptions to that impossible client who wants everything yesterday.
Making It Stick in Australian Workplaces
Here's where I get opinionated: most Australian workplaces are too polite for effective creative problem solving.
We don't challenge bad ideas quickly enough. We spend too much time building consensus and not enough time testing assumptions. We're terrified of looking stupid, so we stick with safe, boring solutions that sort of work.
The best creative problem solving sessions I've facilitated always include at least one person who's comfortable being wrong publicly. They suggest ridiculous ideas that spark better ideas in others. They ask naive questions that expose fundamental flaws in our thinking.
If your team doesn't have someone like this, hire them. Or train someone to play this role. Creative problem solving isn't a solo sport.
The Confidence Factor
Something I got wrong for years: I thought creative problem solving was about techniques and tools. Brainstorming methods, thinking frameworks, facilitation processes.
Important stuff, but secondary.
The real barrier is confidence. Most people don't believe they're creative. They think creativity is for artists and inventors, not accountants and project managers.
This is demonstrably false. I've seen admin staff come up with solutions that stumped senior consultants. I've watched tradies solve complex logistical problems that defeated MBA graduates.
Creativity isn't about artistic talent. It's about willingness to think differently, experiment safely, and learn from interesting mistakes.
What Actually Works (Based on 847 Workshops)
After running workshops across Australia for fifteen years, here's what consistently produces breakthrough solutions:
Time pressure. Counter-intuitive, but true. Give people too much time and they overthink. Give them exactly enough time and they bypass their internal critic.
Mixed groups. Never solve problems with only the people who created them. Bring in outsiders, especially people from completely different departments or industries.
Physical movement. Standing up, walking around, changing locations. The brain thinks differently when the body moves differently.
Stupid ideas first. Start every session by generating deliberately bad solutions. It's liberating and often contains seeds of brilliance.
Real constraints. Don't pretend budget and politics don't matter. Work within actual limitations—it forces more creative thinking than unlimited resources.
None of this requires expensive training or complex methodologies. It requires permission to think differently and practice applying these principles to real problems.
The Bottom Line
Creative problem solving isn't magic. It's not reserved for special people with artistic temperaments. It's a learnable skill that becomes more valuable every year as routine problems get automated away.
The organisations that thrive in the next decade will be those that develop this capability systematically, not just in innovation labs or special projects, but in everyday operations.
Start small. Pick one recurring problem your team faces. Gather people who normally wouldn't work on it together. Give them permission to suggest ridiculous solutions. See what happens.
You might be surprised by how quickly "impossible" problems become merely difficult. And difficult problems? Those are just puzzles waiting for the right combination of creativity and common sense.
Most of which, if we're honest, we already have. We just need to remember how to use it.
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