We’ve laid the groundwork, so now we open Pandora’s box: creative problem-solving. Through this alchemy, you bring the personal twist of subjective creativity into the mix. Here are some of the handiest tools:

1. Design Thinking: A Human-Centered Approach 

A core tenet of design thinking is empathy for the user or the customer – the process involved is iterative (you are encouraged to):

Empathize: Understand the needs and challenges of those affected by the problem.

 Define: Clearly articulate the core problem you're trying to solve.

Ideate: Come up with lots of creative and unorthodox solutions; the wilder the idea the better. Prototype: Build quick, testable versions of your ideas to get early feedback.

Test: Observe and analyze how your prototype performs and iterate based on user feedback.

2. Brainstorming: Where Quantity Breeds Quality

A classic technique for doing creative problem solving is brainstorming. The idea is that you and a group come up with as many ideas that solve the problem as possible – whether seemingly sensible or downright crazy. Here is a list of rules to follow for brainstorming.

Suspend Judgment: No criticism or filtering of ideas is allowed during brainstorming. 

Be open to wild ideas: the more out-there the better! This might be the most unexpected suggestion of all, but sometimes the stupidest idea can crack open a breakthrough.

Build on Others' Ideas: Use each other's thoughts as springboards to generate new possibilities. 

Record Everything: Log every thought, even the spurious ones. You can sort them out later.

3.Creative Problem-Solving Techniques Beyond Brainstorming

Creative problem-solving is full of tricks other than brainstorming: Brainwriting. It’s like brainstorming, but each person develops ideas on their own and then discusses them.Lists. List things that don’t fit the problem at hand.Opposites. Come up with ideas that are the opposite of what’s really needed. How could we invert email into an asynchronous product? Edge Finder. Slice a problem into ever-narrower segments. For instance, if you want to go grocery shopping without fighting traffic, you might think about alternatives for food, cooking, shopping, and transportation.Killer questions. Ask lots of probing questions to break open a problem.Reverse cause and effect. Start with the desired outcome and work backwards. Keep asking ‘why’ until you get an original idea.Killer curves. Imagine searching for the extraordinary in a field of boring examples.Yin and yang. What would be the exact opposite of something? Imagine how you would solve a problem that way, and then fix it from there.Human centered design. Visualize someone’s life and then choose a part of the life-experience you want to improve.What-if scenarios.

SCAMPER: This heuristic encourages you to substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to other uses, eliminate, and rearrange elements of the problem to generate new solutions. 

Mind Mapping: Novelists Jennifer Egan and Thomas Pynchon recommend mapping the information on different branches, creating a mind map of ideas and their interrelationships. Mapping helps you explore relationships and patterns that you might not spot otherwise.

Lateral Thinking: Seek a detour from common logical thinking. Find solutions that are derived from the problem’s distant rather than immediate context, and rely on insight and intuition. Reverse Thinking: Turn the problem on its head. When you’re stumped, instead of ‘How to X?’ ask yourself ‘How to make X worse?’ The solutions to that problem might lead to your actual solution.

Just remember that, like any muscle in your body, the more you use it and exercise it, the more toned it will become. Keep practicing and looking at problems from new angles, sets of associations and possibilities. Allow yourself to see yourself and your creative problem from the perspective of a misfit. Try out as many skills as you can! **Become a Misfit Mogul: Take Action Today!