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Why Your Creative Problem Solving Mindset is Probably Backwards (And How Jazz Musicians Got It Right)
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Three weeks ago, I watched a senior manager spend forty-seven minutes explaining why they needed a "structured ideation framework" to solve a simple rostering problem. Forty-seven minutes! Meanwhile, their receptionist had already figured out the solution during her smoke break and implemented it before lunch.
This is the problem with how most Australians think about creative problem solving. We've turned it into this mystical, process-heavy beast that requires workshops, facilitators, and enough sticky notes to deforest Tasmania. But here's what I've learned after two decades of watching brilliant people overthink themselves into paralysis: the best creative problem solvers don't follow frameworks at all.
They think like jazz musicians.
The Improvisation Advantage
Jazz musicians don't sit down and plan out every note before they play. They know the structure, understand the rules, and then they break them beautifully. They respond to what's happening in real time. They build on what the other musicians are doing. They're not afraid to hit a wrong note because they know they can make it work in the next bar.
Most business people approach problems like classical musicians reading sheet music. Everything has to be perfect, predetermined, and approved by committee. But creativity doesn't work that way. Never has.
I remember working with a mining company in Western Australia where the engineering team spent six months developing a "comprehensive solution methodology" for equipment failures. Six months! And you know what happened when a critical piece of machinery broke down during that period? The maintenance crew just fixed it. No methodology required.
The maintenance guys had what I call an improvisation advantage. They looked at the problem, drew on their experience, tried something, adjusted when it didn't work perfectly, and kept going until they found a solution. No PowerPoint presentations. No stakeholder consultations.
Just creative problem solving in action.
Why Australian Businesses Struggle With Creative Thinking
We're particularly bad at this in Australia because we've got this cultural obsession with "doing things properly." Don't get me wrong, proper procedures have their place. You want your accountant following proper procedures. Your safety manager definitely should be following proper procedures.
But when you're trying to solve a genuinely novel problem, proper procedures are often the enemy of creative solutions.
I've seen this play out hundreds of times in Australian workplaces. Someone has a creative idea that could genuinely solve a problem, but instead of testing it quickly and cheaply, they have to:
- Write a business case
- Get stakeholder buy-in
- Form a working group
- Conduct a feasibility study
- Present to senior management
- Wait for budget approval
- Implement in the next financial year
By which time, the problem has either solved itself, gotten worse, or been solved by someone else who just got on with it.
The Permission Problem
Here's an uncomfortable truth: most people don't actually want to be creative problem solvers. They want someone else to give them permission to implement the creative solutions they've already thought of.
I see this constantly in training workshops. People will spend the morning brainstorming brilliant ideas, then spend the afternoon explaining why none of them will work in their organisation.
"Management wouldn't support it." "We don't have the budget." "It's not how we do things here." "What if it goes wrong?"
But creative problem solving isn't about getting permission. It's about taking small, smart risks and learning fast from the results.
The Fast Failure Framework (The Only Framework You Need)
If I absolutely had to give you a framework for creative problem solving, here it is:
Try something small. Quickly.
If it works, do more of it. If it doesn't work, try something else. Don't spend three weeks analysing why it didn't work unless you're dealing with safety-critical systems.
That's it. That's the framework.
I know this sounds overly simplistic, but I've watched this approach solve problems that stumped entire departments. A friend of mine runs a logistics company in Melbourne, and they were struggling with delivery route optimisation. Instead of buying expensive software or hiring consultants, they gave their drivers Google Maps and asked them to experiment with different routes for a week.
The drivers found efficiencies that no algorithm would have discovered because they understood things like which businesses receive deliveries through back entrances, which customers are always running late, and which intersections turn into parking lots at 3:30 PM when the schools let out.
Small experiment. Quick results. Problem solved.
Why Most Creative Problem Solving Training is Backwards
Most creative problem solving approaches start with the wrong question. They ask "How do we generate more ideas?" when they should be asking "How do we get better at implementing the ideas we already have?"
Because here's the thing - lack of ideas is rarely the problem. I've never worked with a team that genuinely couldn't think of potential solutions to their challenges. The problem is usually that they've convinced themselves their ideas won't work before they've even tried them.
Or they've set the bar so high for "success" that anything short of perfection feels like failure.
I worked with a retail chain recently where the regional managers had identified seventeen different ways to improve customer service. Seventeen! But they couldn't agree on which one to try first, so they tried none of them. Meanwhile, their customer satisfaction scores kept dropping.
Eventually, the area manager just picked one randomly and told each store to try it for two weeks. Twelve of the seventeen ideas worked well enough to implement permanently. The other five taught them valuable lessons about what their customers actually wanted.
The Real Secret: Embracing Productive Messiness
The most creative problem solvers I know are comfortable with messiness. Not chaos - there's a difference. Productive messiness means you're willing to have multiple solutions running simultaneously, even if they don't integrate perfectly.
You're willing to have different teams try different approaches to the same problem.
You're willing to implement something that's 80% right now instead of waiting for something that's 100% perfect later.
You're willing to look stupid if it means learning something useful.
This drives process-oriented people crazy, but it gets results. Fast results.
Getting Started (Without Overthinking It)
If you want to develop a more creative problem-solving mindset, here's what actually works:
Start small. Find a minor irritation in your workplace - something that affects you personally but isn't mission-critical. Maybe the coffee machine is in the wrong place, or the weekly reports could be formatted differently, or there's a better way to schedule meetings.
Fix it without asking permission. Don't write a proposal. Don't form a committee. Just fix it and see what happens.
If it works and people notice, you've just demonstrated creative problem solving in action. If it doesn't work, you've learned something useful with minimal downside.
Then find a slightly bigger problem and repeat the process.
The Jazz Musician Approach in Practice
Remember those jazz musicians I mentioned at the beginning? Here's how their approach translates to business problem solving:
Know your constraints (like jazz musicians know the chord progressions), but don't let them limit your creativity. Use them as a foundation for innovation.
Listen to what's happening around you. The best solutions often come from paying attention to information that everyone else is ignoring.
Be willing to improvise. When something unexpected happens, treat it as an opportunity rather than a setback.
Build on other people's ideas instead of competing with them. The best solutions are usually collaborative, even when one person gets the credit.
Practice regularly. Creativity is a skill that improves with use, not a talent that some people have and others don't.
Why This Matters More Than Ever
We're living through a period of unprecedented change, and the problems we're facing don't have established solutions. Climate change, remote work, supply chain disruptions, skills shortages - these challenges require creative problem solving, not adherence to traditional approaches.
The organisations that thrive will be the ones that can adapt quickly, experiment constantly, and learn from both their successes and their failures.
The ones that insist on following proper procedures for everything will be the ones explaining to their stakeholders why they couldn't pivot fast enough when the world changed around them.
So stop waiting for permission to be creative. Stop looking for the perfect framework.
Start improvising. Start small. Start now.
Your problems are waiting for solutions, not processes.