Creativity & Problem Solving

By Dr Donnie Adams, Dr Kenny Cheah & Dr Siaw Yan Li
Institute of Educational Leadership, University of Malaya

Dr. Kenny Cheah
B.Sc (Applied); Med (Mgmt) (UM); PhD (Educational
Leadership) (Univ. Malaya)
Dr. Siaw Yan Li
BSc (Human Development) UPM; MSc (Educational
Psychology) UPM; PhD (Educational Psychology) UPM
Dr. Donnie Adams
B.Ed (Hons) Guidance & Counseling (Unirazak); PhD
(Educational Leadership) (Univ. Malaya)

 1. MUST KNOW
 2. SHOULD KNOW
 3. GOOD TO KNOW
So being a Malaysian, we have 4th and
5th category.. Anyone can guess?

 1. MUST KNOW
 2. SHOULD KNOW
 3. GOOD TO KNOW
4. WHY NEED TO KNOW? (APA
MASALAH?) …
5. NO NEED TO KNOW LAH! (TAK
PAYAHLAH)...

1. Four Essential Thinking Skills: Creative,
Critical, Analytical and Strategic
2. Case Study in Thinking Strategically to Solve an
Issue
3. Problem Solving and Decision Making Models

 At your most active, you generate beta waves (for instance, when you're in the
middle of a job interview). When you’re relaxed (like when you’ve finally wrapped
that big project and can take a breath), your brain switches to alpha waves. Now,
jumping ahead for a minute, the fourth stage is delta and it’s when you’re in a
deep sleep

 Individuals who do a lot of freeway driving often get good ideas during those
periods when they are in theta . . . This can also occur in the shower or tub or even
while shaving or brushing your hair. It is a state where tasks become so automatic
that you can mentally disengage from them. The ideation that can take place
during the theta state is often free flow and occurs without censorship or guilt.
 You’re also in theta when you’re falling asleep or waking up and between active
alertness and deep dreaming.
 During this awakening cycle it is possible for individuals to stay in the theta state
for an extended period of say, five to 15 minutes—which would allow them to have
a free flow of ideas about yesterday's events or to contemplate the activities of the
forthcoming day. This time can be an extremely productive and can be a period of
very meaningful and creative mental activity.

1. Pick an ENJOYABLE task.
2. Take notes
3. Review. Keep track of your "theta thoughts" so you can look them at them over
time and find patterns.
4. Mistakes are lessons not to paralyze you

LET’S TEST YOUR CREATIVITY POTENTIAL….

1. I am Creative 12345
2. If I think I am creative, I will be creative 12345
3. I like to discover my creativity potential 12345
4. I explore new ways of doing things 12345
5. I’m willing to take risks in doing things differently 12345
6. I yearn to learn outside my scope of work 12345
7. I prefer ideas and theories to facts and figures 12345
8. I ask lots of questions before giving my response 12345
9. I love doing mentally stimulating exercises 12345
10. I enjoy jokes and funny cartoons 12345

41-50: Should be More Creative
31-40: Fairly Creative
21-30: Creative
10-20: Very Creative
Hold on…let’s think analytically. Is the score logical?

41-50: Very Creative
31-40: Creative
21-30: Fairly Creative
10-20: Should be More Creative

~ The first step in innovation is creativity
~

You are Creative: Let Your Creativity Bloom by Yew Kam Keong.

Institute Creativity Awards
Nurture staff’s creativity
Notify results of suggestions received
Organize an Annual Family Creativity Festival
Value Copycats
Allow a cooling off period
Train staff in creativity skills
Implement a Mistake of the Month Award
View results of creativity by measurement tools.
Encourage free association

Institute Creativity Awards
 Recognition is one of the most powerful motivating factors for
individuals.
 Example: Robotic assembly line-> Powerful lighting.
Nurture staff’s creativity
 Bureaucratic procedures may become an impediment to creativity
 Managing the imagination of your people is much more important than
managing the organization structure

Notify results of suggestions received
 Suggestion boxes and other forms of feedback are ineffective because it
was perceived as not ‘serious’
 Resolved by making it the management’s responsibility to respond within
a specified time frame or the suggestion is automatically approved
Organize an Annual Family Creativity Festival
 There are undiscovered talents in every organization. A creativity festival
provides opportunity to uncover such talents. Creativity blossoms in fun
atmosphere.

Value Copycats
 A company called Raychem promotes stealing of ideas. Calls it ‘Creative
imitation’.
 Created two awards:
1) The person who copies the idea
2) The person who provided the idea within the organization.
Allow a cooling off period
 An idea that is enthusiastically endorsed by all present at a meeting is
probably what the meeting wants to hear.
 If everyone agreed with an idea, put off decision making to allow for a
cooling off period to re-examine the idea. Often, the original idea was not a
very good one and better solution was found upon reflection.

Train staff in creativity skills
 Creativity is a skill that can be taught through specific techniques which
enhances inherent creativity.
Implement a Mistake of the Month Award
 Success comes from making right decisions. Right decisions requires
experience. Experience comes from making mistakes.
 A senior Engineer of IBM made a $20 million mistake. The engineer
stayed on to become one of IBM’s most valuable staff.
Steve Harvey

View results of creativity by measurement tools.
 The value of the idea of saving electricity by switching off the lighting in the
robotic assembly was easily measurable -> Huge cost saving!
Encourage free association
 Casual conversations among employees are potent weapons for breakthroughs.

 Strategic thinking involves the
formulation and implementation of
the major ideas, goals and initiatives
taken by a company's top
management on behalf of owners,
based on consideration of resources
and an assessment of the internal
and external environments in which
the organization competes

 Grounded in Scientific Rationality
 A sequential process: (a) seeking the right Questions; (b) Discover creative
answers; (c) Ensure chosen solution is valuable and useful
 Some other common steps are: (a) Identifying the problem; (b) Generating
alternatives; (c) Evaluating alternatives; and (d) Choosing appropriate solution

 Simon (1947) Administrative Behavior
 Human decision is limited by available information and cognitive information-
processing ability (also called bounded rationality)
 Humans lack cognitive resources and rarely evaluate all outcomes, probability of
outcomes and limited by memories, experience and knowledge
 Satisficing is used to explain how decision-makers behave in the world of
uncertainty, conscious biases and limited knowledge of any given situation. At this
point, it is almost impossible to make rational decision

 Lindblom (1959) “The Science Muddling Through”, Public Administration Review
 Attempts to correct the deficiencies of the rational model and to better describe
how decision-makers actually behaved in reality
 A method of working by adding to a project using small, unplanned and
incremental changes instead of taking large extensive steps
 Decision-makers do not always see a clear goal when solving a problem, and the
use of decision-making models are situational

 Strategic managers forged their strategies for change only gradually as events
unfold, keeping their options open and steering their organization incrementally
towards the goal.
 Incrementalism allows for countless end-means and means-end adjustments that
makes the problem more manageable
 “Muddling through” offers an alternative when problems become more complex
and theories becomes inadequate to explain

 Etzioni (1967) Mixed Scanning: A ‘Third’ approach to Decision-making
 Involves two sets of judgments: (a) broad, fundamental choices about the
organization’s basic policy and direction; (b) incremental decisions that ‘prepare
way for new, basic judgment and implements them once they are made’
 Decision-makers broadly scan the field of interest, and identify which one should
be taken incrementally or rationally.
 This model uses Incremental model’s flexibility and Satisficing model’s of bounded
rationality
 Two advantageous : (a) provides strategy for evaluation; (b) flexible and useful in
an environment of varying stability

 Cohen, March and Olsen (1972) The Garbage Can Model of Organizational choice
 Decision-making can be a sloppy, haphazard and confusing process
 Operates in Two Levels: (a) that choice is fundamentally ambiguous; (b) the effort
to describe the way which organization deal with the flow of problems, solutions,
and decision-makers (like a ‘garbage can’ situation).

 There are four streams of interactions in a ‘garbage can’:
1. Problems
2. Solutions
3. Participants
4. Choice opportunities

 Decision-makers allocate time and energy to choice opportunities (unrelated and
simultaneous available problems, solutions, goals, interest and concerns). The link
between a problem and a solution depends heavily on the simultaneity of their
‘arrivals’.
 Decision-making in the real world takes place in an environment where goals,
constraints, and consequences of possible actions are not known precisely.
 Decision-makers may perceive a decision when: (a) an action is taken, even if this
action solves no problems in the garbage can; (b) when the problem is removed
from the garbage can, even if no action has been taken to cause its own removal;
or (c ) when an action is mated with the problem and is called the ‘solution’.

 It can be curiously seen as divorced from centralization policy, standard operating
procedures and traditional classical organizational theorists.
 Nevertheless, organizations that function with inherent ambiguities within their
process of decision-making will observe the garbage can model in operation

 Politics are inevitable part of organizational life.
 “There is always those who want to seize power for their own persona
ends...Power relations get played out in a variety of ways: political tactics and
games, bargaining and conflict resolution” Hoy and Miskel (2013),
Education Administration
 Decision-makers observe both the formal and informal, legitimate and illegitimate
forms of power. Behavior is a function of interaction between organization
structure, individual, culture and policies at work.
 Political model does not assume that decisions are a result of applying existing
SOPs, programs and routines, but instead through bargaining among coalitions
and different groups.

 Decision-making is a process of conflict resolution, consensus building and
outcome of decision as products of compromise.
 Stakeholders have different perceptions, priorities and solutions to the problem,
no particular decision can be made if posing harm to the stakeholder, even though
it is the best and optimum solution.
 Political decision-making may be legitimate and beneficial in a sense that it may
chart a new path for unpopular decision that may work for organization.

 Influences decision-makers in two broad areas:
(a) Dealing with Moral temptations within the individual decision-maker. They are
the values of rights and the wrongs, and he/she has to resist moral temptations
because of personal preferences and weaknesses.
(b) Concerned with variables that form and define situations (or contexts) in which
the individual makes the decision.

Eight steps
1. Identify problem or dilemma
2. Identify potential issues involved
3. Review relevant ethical codes
4. Know the applicable laws and regulations
5. Obtain consultation
6. Consider possible and probable courses of action
7. Enumerate the consequences of various decisions
8. Decide on what appears to be the best course of action

 There is no Perfect model for decision-making
 What scholars do is to close the gap between theory, reality and practice
 Each model portrays its own SWOT
 People can still make bad decisions to arrive to a better decision.
 Few guidelines to consider : (a) seek information from a variety of perspectives,
including the ones not directly involved in the decision; (b) best leaders do make
mistakes, therefore do not enforce failure-fearing

 Decision-making is a process that is inter-related and overlapping between models

ANALYZE
A woman was filling up her bathtub with hot water when
the hot water ran out. She therefore decided to heat some
water using a kettle on the kitchen stove in order to add to
the water in the bath to raise the temperature to the
desired result. After some time, her husband walked in.
He told her to stop heating the water on the stove because
the more she heated the water, the colder will her bath be.
Why?

ANALYZE
Two girls were playing in a tennis competition. They had
to play 5 sets before the match result could be
determined. When the final results were announced, each
of the girls won three sets. How was this possible?

ANALYZE
Solution…Write an ‘S’ in front or the
number ‘6’ behind.

ANALYZE
A lady had 10 apples in a basket. She distributed an apple
to each of the ten children. After all the ten children have
taken their apples, there was still one apple left in the
basket. Why?
Solution…
After giving away nine apples, the lady gave the basket
together with the last apple to the tenth child.

ANALYZE
A man was drinking coffee at this table by the window. He
was enjoying the view outside his window when suddenly
on impulse; he jumped out of the 20-storey building. He
landed safely, unhurt in any way. There was nothing to
cushion his landing. How was this possible?
Solution…
The man jumped out of the window on the ground floor of
the 20-storey building.

ANALYZE
A man was found dead at his office desk with a pistol by
his side. On the desk was a tape recorder. Pushing the
play button brought the message “I can’t take it anymore.
I want to end my agony”, followed by the sound of a pistol
shot. The police concluded almost immediately that the
man was murdered. How?
Solution…
A dead man will not be able to rewind the tape.

Dr. Kenny Cheah
kennycheah@um.edu.my
Direct Tel line: 03-22463413
Dr. Siaw Yan Li
yanli@um.edu.my
Dr. Donnie Adams
donnieadams@um.edu.my

Creativity & Problem Solving

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