Education

What's your creative problem solving profile?

I’m sure many of you have taken the Myers Briggs personality profile, or perhaps the DISC profile. Well, I’ve recently been invited to participate in an innovation profile study and in an effort to do some preliminary research on the theory behind the study, I came across the Creative Problem Solving Profile.

You’ll have to register to see what your profile is. The one page screen asks you to rate yourself on a series of characteristics in problem solving and then places you in one of four quadrants:

  • Generator – suggests interests in problem finding and fact finding
  • Conceptualizer – suggests interests in problem definition and idea finding
  • Optimizer – suggests interests in idea evaluation and selection and action planning
  • Implementer – suggests interests in gaining acceptance and implementation

My profile came out (in order of most to least) Generator, Implementor, Conceptualizer, Optimizer.

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Slideshare

Bill Scott has one of his presentations up on Slideshare. The really interesting stuff starts at slide 11 where he discusses some principles for interaction, feedback, and info.

What’s really interesting about this is that I’ve been thinking about sharing some of our guiding principles. We’re up to about 27 right now. These are 27 guiding principles we use when designing products and services. We live and die by these things. They’re pretty powerful and have been at the heart of enabling us to

  • keep clarity and simplicity in the products/services we’re designing
  • take something old, and make it new again
  • find new revenue streams for our clients

What’s really important to understand is that they’re guiding principles – guidelines, not hard and fast rules.

What do you think? Would you be interested in reading 27 guiding principles for design?

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Entrepreneurial Education Program

Here’s an interesting concept from the Danish Group KaosPilot. It’s a school focused on creating entrepreneurs. I really like their values:

[...]the school is more than just a three-year Bachelor education in creative business design and social innovation. It is also an education with a clearly defined set of values that runs all through the education.

At a major seminar for the students, colleagues, board of directors and external partners in 2001 – the so-called POP-seminar held every 2 or 3 years – it was decided that the school’s most important values be identified. Six basic values and attitudes were outlined as indispensable to the educational program. They are:

  • Playful – It has to be motivational, creative and constructive to be at the KaosPilots.
    Real world – the students and staff have to work with real problems, real people and real conflicts.
  • Streetwise – the school must never be out of touch with what is happening at street level in our society.
  • Risk-taking – the program and the staff must possess the will to be brave and take risks.
  • Balanced – the school must strive for the right dynamic and balance between bodyand soul, between form and content and, not least, between human, timeand economic resources.
  • Compassionate – human compassion and social responsibility must be the hallmarks of the school.

The formulation of these values proved to be an identity breakthrough for The KaosPilots and serves today as a quality filter for all decisions, projects, employment, arrangements, etc. The six values have proven to be resistant to the discussions arising now and then about supplementing or replacing them. So far, the students and staff have held on to these values as the school’s entirely unique and indispensable core values.

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