Problem solving is something that business teams have to deal with every single day. While some solutions can be helpful and leave a positive lasting impact, others can be overly generic or fall short. For this reason, creative problem solving is a key focus for those looking to enhance and innovate within the workplace.
Taking creative approaches can yield great benefits for problem solving.
Many of them are much better than tried-and-true methods, which is why we want to talk about what they offer.
The Benefits of Creative Problem Solving
1. More Innovative Solutions
When a company encourages creative problem solving, they invite more innovative solutions.
If employees know that they can think outside of the box, they will do so.
With time, they will get better at it.
Encouraging creative solutions makes it possible for even bigger innovations down the line.
Employees will feel more comfortable with their line of thought and will seek out further innovations.
More innovations can lead to significant company improvements that otherwise would have taken much longer to come by.
By chasing innovation around every corner, companies are more likely to find the future of their business processes. Even better, it will happen sooner rather than later.
2. Increased Approachability
Approachability is a major point of concern for businesses because it determines how active employees are.
Most companies want employees that are highly engaged and can find their voices in an environment.
Making an approachable environment can make that possible, and creative problem solving might just be the key.
When employees see that their creativity is to be encouraged, they are more likely to speak up.
Too often, only certain personality types are comfortable with making their voices heard.
They see the people who think similarly to leaders have their ideas supported and think that they might not have as much to offer.
When they see diverse thinking is being encouraged, they will be more likely to put in their two cents and voice their opinions.
3. Solutions with Less Bias
Supporting diverse thinking isn’t just beneficial for helping employees to feel heard.
It is also remarkably effective at providing better and more creative solutions.
Even the most creative people will carry their biases into a problem solving situation.
More often than not, this isn’t a good thing.
Supporting creativity and diverse thinking can often be the solution in a lot of cases.
Since everyone brings their own biases into a solution, you might be wondering how this will help.
When creative problem solving opens the gates to allow more employees to voice their distinct opinions, magic happens.
By presenting these kinds of spaces, you will encourage the kind of idea sharing that can slowly remove bias from the solution process.
When more employees work together, they can help to work through biases or limitations that might have been overlooked for a better overall solution.
Diverse thinking sparks creative discussions
Our flexible idea management software removes unwanted bias from the creative brainstorming process.
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4. Creativity BoostS Employee Engagment
Encouraging creativity can work wonders for employee engagement.
The best part is that creativity tends to build on itself.
When creative problem solving becomes more prominent in the workplace, people tend to get more creative.
They will see these other creative solutions and start to think more outside of the box.
This will encourage idea sharing by making the environment seem more approachable. Better still, it will help with how employees approach problem solving in general.
More creative employees can offer more innovative problem solving solutions, particularly when encouraged.
An environment that rewards creative solutions automatically incentivises creative thinking, which means more employees will work at it.
Ultimately, this can lead to even better solutions down the line.
5. Solutions That Work
While tried-and-true methods can be beneficial, their impact can be lost over time.
It is fairly easy for effective solutions that work today to become ‘out-of-date solutions’ tomorrow.
This is because businesses are beginning to innovate incredibly fast.
Creative problem solving solutions can often be solutions that work much more effectively.
This is true because they tend to be adapted for more modern circumstances, but also because they offer a more custom approach.
Every business is different.
While businesses can learn from one another, not every solution will work for every business.
Creative problem solving solutions tend to step outside of the norm and fit the specific company that they are designed for.
Rather than providing a solution that checks a few boxes, creative solutions can be a perfect custom fit. More often than not, they will yield much better results.
Conclusion
In order to gain the benefits of creative problem solving, a company must first begin by encouraging it.
Supporting idea sharing and offering employees a chance to have their voices heard can go a long way with groups.
It determines how creative a group will get.
To really encourage creative solutions, it is important to get the right people in the room — the more the better.
Use effective tools to make collaboration and problem solving easy, and you will reap the rewards.
A company that fosters creativity will always be one step ahead of its competitors, so start thinking more creatively today!
