Turn
your Problems into yours Goals
The word “goal” as the aim of the creativity process.
Firstly, translating a problem (if you are starting from a problem) into a goal
encourages you to question the problem. This, in my experience, is where most
people fail when trying to solve problems. They immediately try to come up with
ideas rather than try to understand the problem properly.
Goal statements from
problems, makes you think about the problem and what aspect of it you actually
wish to solve. If you say “we need to increase sales”, most people will
immediately reply, “of course you do. Every business does! What do you want to
do? Improve your sales process? Improve your marketing communications? Make
your product more desirable?”
With these questions, you may realise that your goal is to
generate more leads for your sales team. Or you might realise that your
products are perceived as out of date by the young people you are trying to
sell to, so you need to make your products more modern . Clearly, these two
goals are very, very different! Yet either or both could be goals you need to
strive for in order to achieve your overriding goal of selling more.
In addition, I believe that using creativity to achieve a
goal is more positive and motivating than using it to solve a problem. Sure, it
is essentially the same thing. But which challenge do you think most people
would find more interesting?
Goals
and sub-goals
Working with goals instead of problems also makes it easier
to divide big goals into smaller sub-goals which may become a part of the final
solution. This can be important too .Of course problems are still relevant to
creative idea generation. If we face problems, in business or personally, that
we wish to solve through creativity, it is still essential to deconstruct and
analyse those problems. Formulating a goal statement is ultimately a reworking
of a problem statement. , if we aim to focus creativity on attaining stated
goals, we will get more interesting results.
Comments
Post a Comment