Creative Thinking And Problem Solving

John Fabian

• Éditeur: CRC Press
• Année: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351088107
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Technik & Maschinenbau
• Sous-sujet: Maschinen- und Anlagebau

A practical new book for scientists, engineers, project leaders, and others working in the technical fields. The book adds depth, "how-to", and success to your creative thinking and problem solving.
This book will allow you to sharpen your creative edge, giving you better problem solving skills. Whether you are a scientist working on breakthrough research, an engineer on the forefront of product development, or a project manager forging teams to reach and exceed goals, this new book gives you the fundamentals and advanced techniques of creative thinking to break new ground and reach higher levels of excellence.

1 The Quest: Pursuing Creativity and Innovation

Chance favors the prepared mind.

—LOUIS PASTEUR

Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there. A new idea is a light that illuminates presences which simply had no form for us before the light fell on them.

—SUSAN LANGER

INTRODUCTION

Are you a modern-day Ponce de León, wanting to make a great discovery? Have you stumbled onto the fountain of creative thinking? There is a wellspring of creativity and innovation that flows from the distant past to the modern present. Do your thoughts, tinkering, or theorizing sparkle with aha’s and creative energy? Then you are part of that stream of imagination.

Your quest for a momentous discovery could be taking place:

• On vacation, as you lazily think of new uses for miniaturization. Walking barefooted along the beach, you may conjure up mental images of miniature computerized probes tucked in the human body, automatically sensing hormone imbalances, circulatory pressures, hints of disease.

• In an out-of-the-way laboratory of your company, as you join your “tiger team” colleagues. You are engaged in a quiet but intense search for winning applications using a new gene-splitting process recently developed by your company.

• In a home shop or garage, as you try to improve a manufacturing process that has baffled your peers at work. You are intent on finding an answer, even though you have to step outside your discipline to do it.

• At your office, as you doodle with calculations to unlock a riddle for propulsion in outer space.

• In an organizational environment that tends to squelch imagination, as you search for new refrigerants that won’t damage atmospheric ozone. You have to fight a steady chorus of “It can’t be done” or “We don’t have time to fool around with ideas that won’t give us a quick payback.”

Are you intrigued with the notion of tapping and enhancing creativity and producing more inventive ideas? You may already be brimming with imagination. If so, you may simply need a way to understand or to channel creative thinking more effectively—in yourself and in others. Or you may believe you came up short when creativity was passed around. If so, you likely need to catch a vision of your natural but partially hidden talent for inspired thinking. You most likely will also have to observe, then destroy, how you crush or muffle your creative thought.

Journeying into the land of creativity may cause you to be excited, yet also a bit wary. Creative thinking is an adventure of the mind. The venture requires alert, curious, exploratory thinking. The enterprise takes an apparent paradox — disciplined as well as intuitive reasoning. The undertaking needs skills that are seemingly inbred or learned, mental strategies that break old habits, techniques that can spark imagination in us or in groups. Although more schools today are trying to spawn inventive thinking, you may have been schooled to play down the use of imagination and play up rational and rote learning.

Many scientists and engineers are right at home balancing flexible, intuitive reasoning with logic and step-by-step processes. Others are uncomfortable with creative thinking because it can’t be forced into a mold or a recipe. They become skeptical with processes that appear fuzzy when they first encounter them. As you move through this book, note your comfort level with the different ideas put forth. Give yourself permission to nibble or gorge yourself on the concepts, exercises, suggestions, and techniques.

Before you explore a creative thinking process that can effectively mobilize your imagination, take a little time in this chapter to get ready for the quest. You will look at what you need to consider in launching a creative effort—the seeds of inspiration and eureka, when to take the inventive journey, what imaginative thinking is and isn’t, who to have join you, what you want to have happen, and how you get breakthrough discoveries.

Getting Inspiration from the Past

A glance back over our shoulders can provide inspiration, if we need it, for freeing our own creativity. Creative thoughts have been with humankind since the beginning. Scientists and engineers were plying their disciplines with imagination long before their fields were formalized and recognized. The wizardry of the mind has not been confined to any one era or location, although some periods of history and some cultures have produced more inspired and lasting products of imaginative thinking than others.

Mejestic pyramids, simple but effective mining apparatus, fine paper, wood-and metal-cutting lathes, destructive gunpowder, and grand scale aqueducts are only a few products of ancient times. They attest to the disciplined and creative minds that left a legacy for their modern counterparts.

L. Sprague de Camp’s fascinating The Ancient Engineers is but one of the chronicles of engineering derring-do of the distant past. When the tales from that book are added to numerous other records, there is a trail of technical marvels and feats from ancient to modern times. Such stories inspire an itching to unleash the imagination.

Do you have anyone who helped fan your creative flame? As I look at my own past, I have been inspired by mentors, colleagues, parents, and accounts of exploits of remarkable accomplishments over the distant and recent past.

My mother, who has her own creative spark, inspired our family with tales of her inventor grandfather, Dan Lehman, who set up a medicine shop in Nappanee, Indiana. He developed good remedies for upset stomachs and bums, pain and coughs, and sore throat and muscular aches.

Perhaps you have someone or some event that helped you hunger to make a great discovery or contribution. There are numerous stories from the past that could lure us into our own creative ventures.

Albert Einstein fantasized about what it would be like to ride a beam of light and formed his famous theory of relativity.¹,²

Thomas Edison, possibly the first systems engineer, pursued many practical needs in the world with intuition and imagination. His creation of the microphone, phonograph, motion pictures, and automatic telegraph would have produced enough acclaim to have satisfied many an inventor. But he also gave us the light bulb and a whole lighting system to go with it.³

An engineer from the eighteenth century, Wilhelm Mayback, became fascinated with a perfume atomizer. It wasn’t the perfume that beguiled him. He linked the process of mixing liquid and air, inventing the carburetor.⁴

Since creative thinkers often break the perception of what has been thought possible, they have sometimes endured the scoffing of both the public and peers.

In the late 1700s, Oliver Evans asked the Pennsylvania legislature for funds to develop a steam-driven carriage, but he was told that such talk could cause him to be declared insane. Evans flew in the face of such criticism by developing a steam-powered amphibious dredge.⁵

Fifteen-year-old Philo Taylor Famsworth proposed an idea for a camera that could change images into electrical impulses, despite many professional engineers believing television broadceisting impractical. His contributions helped usher in the world of television.⁵ More recently, Edwin Land conjured up an idea of an instant camera, only to be told by many professionals in the field that it wouldn’t work. Yet his Polaroid camera broke new paths for photography.

Is it just doggedness or conviction that keeps individuals in hot pursuit of an idea, even after ridicule, management resistance, meager pay, and dead ends? No, there is an adventurous side to creating, an excitement and allure that captures the spirit and gives one purpose. The imaginative act is like a birth taking place in the mind. It has been described as the epitome of challenge, the setting aside of one’s own ego in the heat of creation.

Experiencing Eureka

Words of Archimedes seem to capture the moment and essence of creation.

His task was to determine if a crown given his ruler was real gold. He knew the weight of a given volume of gold. However, the crown was irregular and contained ornaments. The scholar fretted for days, for his old measures would not work. One day he took a bath. In a relaxed state, he observed how the water rose around him as he lowered his body into the tub. The solution flashed in his mind. The crown would displace an amount of water equal to its own volume. “Eureka!” he exclaimed. “I have found it”.⁶

The eureka experience captures the spirit and excitement of many a creator and inventor.

Until the time of Edison, innovation was often linked with the ingenuity and labor of single individuals, pioneers who saw gaps and sought to fill them or who had nagging questions and found some way to answer them. At Menlo Park, Edison, the grandest of the old-time tinkerers and inventors, gathered around him a team of technically minded people to aid his search for solutions to numerous practical problems. Team players, team contributions, and team solutions became increasingly important as knowledge and the complexity of projects grew like a streaking meteor in the twentieth century.

Today organizations rely on the efforts of both individuals and work groups. Companies set their talent on a search for product lines that will whet the “I want to buy it” appetite of more people. Businesses crave breakthrough systems and technologies that can help maintain, gain, or reestablish a market foothold. Industries want innovations that can take them in whole new directions.

The business, industrial, and research world would like to hear more eureka’s. Attempts to use imaginative thinking have possibly never been as widespread as the current fever to instill organizations with the quest to be innovative, vital, and competitive. Books and consultants have been heralding the need to search for, manage, and get a passion for excellence. They espouse entrepreneurship, “skunk” or special project teams, and innovation philosophies and actions that can bring organizational effectiveness and prized new products.

Starting the Journey

Launching the journey toward eureka requires at least three things. You need a readiness to unleash your creative mind. You have to seize opportunities in any work setting. You will have to take a pathway that increases the chances of hitting imaginative pay dirt.

Mental Readiness

Walking the path toward discovery starts first with a keen mental approach. A lulled mind dulls the creative edge. Scientists and engineers have a skeleton of knowledge and methodology. Their musculature is the rigorous execution of their discipline. Ideally their heart and soul are unflagging, child-eyed curiosity and imagination.

Years of technological and scientific schooling, however, can blunt the heart and soul. There is so much knowledge to be learned and so much emphasis on analysis and precision that our creative thinking can remain underdeveloped and underused. In the working world some environments allow the imaginative spark to be kindled, while other job climates dampen the creative flame.

A variety of mental traits can let the creative spirit loose, rather than squelch it. The animal kingdom provides metaphors to parallel the mental approach you need. Engage the world with the curiosity and playfulness of a kitten with a ball of string. Continually scan your world seeking perspective, like an eagle able to soar high yet swoop down to grasp a tasty morsel. Retain full sensory awareness, like a lioness tuned to the environment when protecting her cubs. Pursue ideas with skill and imagination, like a fox stalking its prey.

Alertness to Opportunities

The second requirement of searching for eureka is to look around you in every work setting for chances to use your imagination. Discoveries are waiting to happen at any one of the general phas...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Quest: Pursuing Creativity and Innovation
• 2 The Human Instrument: Knowing Your Mental Equipment
• 3 The Human Instrument: Expressing Breakthrough Qualities
• 4 Breakthrough Discovery Process
• 5 The Target: Taking Aim
• 6 Search Keys: Igniting the Imagination
• 7 Search: Following Steps and Strategy Formats
• 8 Check: Assessing Options
• 9 Action: Launching Ideas
• 10 Enhancements: Enriching Individuals and Groups
• 11 Breakthrough Environments: Setting the Climate
• Notes
• Further Reading
• References
• Index