The team was stuck. The members kept on saying “we haven’t got our chip breakage testing finished. We keep getting inconsistent results. Shipping from some cities, breakage is slightly better than how we do it now, and from other cities it is not quite as good. Also, consumers in some

Having a new idea is fine, but there really is no creativity until it is implemented. The creative process can be thought of as having two halves.  The first half is called “making the familiar strange”.   The second half is called “making the (new) strange familiar”. Generating and conceptualizing are

Instead of running more and more employee engagement surveys, why not just start involving employees in problem solving? People like solving problems. If you are a leader, why not coach your employees to work together to solve work problems that are important to them. Don’t solve the problems for them.

Before you can solve a problem, you have to understand it… And you can’t understand it if you are not sure what the words mean. When we are kids, we think simple and we talk simple. As we grow older, we start learning bigger and bigger words. Some of us

Have you noticed that problem generation does not come easily to many people? They prefer to wait for others to surface problems and to take the lead in finding opportunities for improvement and new approaches. This applies to people at all levels of organizations, including leaders. Creativity begins with generating

Would any automobile company try to build a new car without an assembly line? Just dump the parts on the factory floor and say “go to it” to the workers? Of course not. We all know that the assembly line is a necessary part of building a car that actually