Brain: Creative Problem Solving with SCAMPER

Image of Luciano Passuello

From Denny: From our friends over at LiteMind comes another useful article for your everyday life. They like to write about efficient and innovative ways to use our minds.

Here is an intriguing article about one of my favorite subjects: creative problem-solving!

This is an excerpt from the post by blog owner Luciano Passuello:

"SCAMPER is a technique you can use to spark your creativity and help you overcome any challenge you may be facing. In essence, SCAMPER is a general-purpose checklist with idea-spurring questions — which is both easy to use and surprisingly powerful.

In this posting, I present a complete SCAMPER primer, along with two free creativity-boosting resources: a downloadable reference mind map and an online tool that generates random questions to get you out of a rut whenever you need.

SCAMPER Primer

SCAMPER is based on the notion that everything new is a modification of something that already exists. Each letter in the acronym represents a different way you can play with the characteristics of what is challenging you to trigger new ideas:

S = Substitute

C = Combine

A = Adapt

M = Magnify

P = Put to Other Uses

E = Eliminate (or Minify)

R = Rearrange (or Reverse)

To use the SCAMPER technique, first state the problem you’d like to solve or the idea you’d like to develop. It can be anything: a challenge in your personal life or business; or maybe a product, service or process you want to improve. After pinpointing the challenge, it’s then a matter of asking questions about it using the SCAMPER checklist to guide you."

For the rest of this great article just click on the title link!

Brain: How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci

Cover via Amazon

"In this post, I present a summary of the mind-expanding bestseller How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day, along with some thoughts about Leonardo and the book.

Leonardo is not only probably the greatest genius ever: he’s the one that most fully embodies the ‘Renaissance Man‘ ideal. Pursuing that ideal means being focused not on excelling on a single knowledge domain, but on having a holistic view of excellence in life. It means much more than just intellectual achievement, it means full realization of human potential in every aspect.

In How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, author Michael Gelb does a superb job of capturing the essence of Leonardo’s genius and laying it out in a practical framework for self-improvement. Here are the 7 key areas that shaped Leonardo’s genius and which you can use as a framework for your own self-improvement..."

By Luciano Passuello
litemind.com

From Denny: One of the key areas of Da Vinci's steps for self-improvement that contributed easily to creative problem-solving is "Sfumato: A willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty." This is where I think many experts fall down on the job. It's also why so many of their pronouncements come off sounding childish and off-kilter at times be it from the science, medical or academic communities.

The past eight years of fundamentalism affecting our politics, religion and educational communities has caused a reversal back to simplistic concrete thinking. Concrete thinking doesn't allow for ambiguity, the large grey zone between black and white that takes into account a myriad of things - like shifting time lines affected by our perceptions and resulting decisions.