Coaching teams in Creative Problem Solving v.2

How to coach teams in
creative problem solving
Ari-Pekka Lappi (@ilmirajat)

After this presentation
everyone has at least 1
creativity tool they can use
in their everyday work
within next two weeks.
• On Creativity
• Tool 1: SCAMBER + warmup
• Creativity + Problem solving
• How to Coaching Creative
problem solving
• Tool 2: 9 windows + exercise
• Tool 3: Contradiction analysis +
exercise

Who am I?
• Hybrid philosopher-engineer
• Developer, ScrumMaster, architect
• M.A. majoring theoretical philosophy
from Helsinki University
• Entrepreneur in Flowa
• Big fan of functional programming
(F# and Clojure), philosophy of
Nietzsche
• Hobbyist game designer and game
researcher
• Part-time artist in Reality Research
Center
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Atanas Botev.
Oil on canvas/collage 2004

Who are you?
1. Name
2. On scale 1-100, how creative you think you are
currently? (1=not creative at all, 100=highly
creative)
3. Would it be practical or otherwice benefical to be
more creative?
Most likely follow-up questions
1. What benefits would increased creativity produce to you?
2. Are you already doing something in order to be more creative?

l
Challenges
& unmet
needs
Creative
actions
Innovations
and insights
Overly simplified process
for creative thinking

l
Step 1: Find direction
What is the ideal state/result? What is the
goal? What I want to have?
Challenges
& unmet
needs
Creative
actions
Innovations
and insights
1

l
Step 2: Identify challenge
Why have I not reached the goal already?
What is blocking or preventing me?
Challenges
& unmet
needs
Creative
actions
Innovations
and insights
1

l
Step 3: Look around
Where I am? What do I have (=resources)?
What have I done already?
Challenges
& unmet
needs
Creative
actions
Innovations
and insights
12

l
Step 4: Seek options
What (all) might I do in order to reach the
goal with the resources I have?
Challenges
& unmet
needs
Creative
actions
Innovations
and insights
12

l
Step 5: Experiment
Creative strategy? Creative action?
Creativity is about doing, not about dreaming
Challenges
& unmet
needs
Creative
actions
Innovations
and insights
12 3

l
Simplified process
Challenges
& unmet
needs
Creative
actions
Innovations
and insights
12 3
for creative thinking
Layer2
Psychological
Layer1
Logical

Exercise 1 – Step 1
It can be anything from a pen or shoe to table. I will use light
bulb as an example so please choose something else.

The main function of a light bulb is “to
illuminate”.

E.g. What use could a light bulb have, if its main
function was not to illuminate.

Signal what is happening in a machine

Creative strategies/action
(1) Eliminate
+
(2) Put to another use

In case of light bulb the main function is “to illuminate”.
So I choose “to walk”.

Creative strategy/action
Combine

E.g. ‘class shell’ around the wolfram wire.

E.g. ‘a table’

Light table… boring. Let me try again ‘door’. Using light as a door.
Kind of theatrical effect… Better.

Creative strategy/action
Substitude

Coaching teams in Creative Problem Solving v.2

Slightly different approaches but
a lot of similarities.

Two modes of coaching
• Listen
• Reflect and rephrase
• What kind of help the coachee
expects from you?
• Reframe
• Deconstruct (“abbauen“)
• Help coachee to ”see” options,
opportunities and novel
approaches?
Depending on your role in team and
situation: Consider switching to
mentoring or teaching mode

Think of pains and struggles just
before the moments of
”heureka” and ”aha, I got it”
What creative struggles have had?
How it feels just before ”heureka” and why?

The most common pains and
struggles in problem solving
My observations

Unresolved
problems Solutions
Gatekeepers

Unresolved
problems
Solutions
Gatekeepers
Challenges
& unmet
needs
Creative
actions
Innovations
and insights
Layer1
Logical
Layer0
Obstacles

l
Challenges
& unmet
needs
Creative
actions
Innovations
and insights
12 3
Layer2
Psychological
Layer1
Logical
Unresolved
problems Solutions
Psychological
intertia
Layer0
Agonistic

Case 1: Bootstrap doesn’t work anymore. It
worked last week. What I have messed up?
Download
Bootstrap
Ensure that it
works
Something
else for week
and two
Continue
(following
the tutorial)
It does not
work
anymore
Something that worked
last week doesn’t
work anymore!

Past Now Future
Super-
system
System
The problem
Sub-
system

Bootstrap did work week
or do ago
Bootstrap doesn’t work
anymore. It worked
last week.
Bootstrap works again
(=problem solved; what might
be differently)
CSS markup and bootstrap files
Html and link to css file
Browsers default rendering rules
Examples in the tutorial

Web site documentation
Development community
Browser version
Version 2.x (newest)
=> Default docs for v2.x
Web site documentation
Development community
Browser version
Version 3.0 (newest)
=> Default docs for v3.0
Bootstrap did work week
or do ago
Bootstrap doesn’t work
anymore. It worked last
week.
Bootstrap works again
(=problem solved; what might
be differently)

Solutions
Bootstrap 3.0 was released a week ago. I had
downloaded the bootstrap 2.x files and tested it
using version 2.x tutorial. Now I continued by
using 3.0 tutorial. There’s a mismatch…

Case 2: After customer have paid, delivery of the
product fails in 1 of 10 000 case due fatal system
failure
Order Payment
Process
order and
payment
Delivery
Fatal (seeminly
non-repetable and
rare) error here

Much earlier: Recurring session
related problems and fixes
Customer service
Company reputation
Customer select product
Customer confirm order
Customer pays product in third party
payment system
When customer returns to the
our system, system throws
fatal error sometimes.
Delivery of the product fails in 1 of
10 000 cases due a fatal server error.
Customer calls to the customer
service and complains about the
problem.
Database call
UI interaction
Session handling
Database calls
Cryptographic stuff (ensure validity
of order)
of payment)
Database calls (get product data, get
order related data, store payment
related data…)
Session handling
Session expiration
Annoyance about the failed delivery
Call to customer service

Much earlier: Recurring session
related problems and fixes
Database server
3rd party payment system
Error logs and audit logs
Web server and application server
Request routing
Caching mechanisms
Customer service
Company reputations
Customer select product
Customer click order and pays
product in thrid part payment system
Customer returns to the our
system. System throws fatal
error.
Delivery of the product fails in 1 of
10 000 cases due a fatal server error.
Customer calls to the customer
service and complains about the
problem.
Database call
UI interaction
Session handling
Database calls
of order)
of payment)
Database calls
Session handling
Session expiration
Annoyance about the failed delivery
Call to customer service
Log entries mapped to the
approximate time of the error and
type of error

Solution
The solution was that in some rare cases a field returned by SQL server was
null (value did not exist) and the system threw NullReferenceException*. The
end user saw just a generic “something went wrong” error.
You needed to add a null check.
[*] As some of you guessed already, the language was C#. In Java you get
NullPointerException, not NullReferenceException.

Exercise 1-1: Getting started
• Form 3-5 person groups
• Choose the problem
• Problem 1: Meetings starts late 50% of times
• Problem 2 (technical): Critical bugs in production system a days after
deployment
• Timebox: 2-3 minutes

Exercise 1-2: Goal
• Step 1: Draw 3 x 3 matrics. Discuss what is the problem you are
actually going to solve?
• Discuss ”why do we want to solve this problem?” and make the problem
better and deeper?
• Step 2: Discuss semantics of the axises
• Don’t talk on the posible solutions at this point!
• Timebox: 5 minutes

Exercise 1-3: First ideas
• Step 4: List ideas relating the idea and
• Step 5: Categorize them by using the matrix
OR
• Step 5: Use categories in the matrix as inpsiratio and
• Step 4: List what you might put to the matrix
• Resist temptation to head directly to the solutions!

Exercise 1-4: What else?
• Step 5: Review what 9 windows boxes are empty or has just few
ideas?
• Why they are empty or have just few idea?
• What might go there?
• Consider relations of the things in the matrix
• Resist temptation to head directly to the solutions!

Exercise 1-5: Solution
• Step 6: Ideate a concrete thing or few concrete things you could try
next.
• Resist temptation to dive deeper to the problem, focus on what might
you do instead!

Case 3: Startups don’t do any risk
management

Where?
• Where should startups do risk management?
• Irrelevant
• Where should startups not do risk management?
• Customer premises?
Image: Nasa
Fine, but this does not
yet solve the problem!

When?
• When should startups do risk management?
• Hour or two once per quarter is probably enough
• When should startups not do risk manement?
• Irrelevant
A solution; maybe good enough

Conditions? Interfaces?
• In which cases or within which conditions startups should do risk
management?
• If they need to do decision having big financial impact
• In which cases or within which conditions should not startups do risk
manement?
• If they do sales
• As a part of their everyday work (usually)
Great, we have a solution!

Outcome
The coachee decided that:
Once per quarter he will go to a restaurant with the founders
of a startup. During that evening they go through what all
could go wrong and get drunk (or another way around).
After that evening, the people switch back to the optimistic
mode.

Case 3: We want to write and read
massive amount of data from a table
at the same time in SQL Server
Guess what --- we had a serious performance
problem.

Where?
• To where need I write data quickly?
• I don’t care as long as the data is persisted to the database and never lost
• From where need I read data quickly?
• I don’t care if I get valid data from database
Image: Nasa
NO WIN!

When?
• When do I want to read data quickly?
• When customer wants to download a dataset he have earlier stored to the
system
• When do I want to write data quickly?
• When customer want to save or upload data to the system
NO WIN!

Conditions? Interfaces?
• In which cases or within which conditions I want to read data quickly?
• Always
• In which cases or within which conditions I want to write data
quickly?
• Only in those cases it have impact to user experience. If I do some stuff as a
background job it does not matter if it takes time.
ROCK! Now we’re talking…

Exercise 1: Contradiction analysis

Exercise 1-1: Getting started
• Form 3-5 person groups
• Choose the problem
• Problem 1: New product vs. the old products
• Problem 2: The impossible report
• Timebox: 2-3 minutes

Exercise 1-2: Analysis
• Step 1: Analyze problem and formulate the contradiction.
• Step 1.1. Draw the contradiction diagram
• Step 1.2: The goal
• Step 1.3: The sub-goal
• Step 1.4: The implications and requirements
• Goal of all is to ”see” clearly what is the underlying fundamental
contraction that makes the problem hard?

Exercise 1-3: What if…
• Step 2: Try to separate contradicting elementes by
• Step 2.1. Space (abstract, social, mental, physical etc.)
• Step 2.2: Time (chronological, experienced, physical etc.)
• Step 3.3: Condition/interface (logical, contract, situation etc.)
• The goal of this is to find novel approach to the problem where the
contradiction is no more relevant or hard?

Thank You!  Discussion
Twitter: @ilmirajat

Coaching teams in Creative Problem Solving v.2

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