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    21st Century Ideas: Necessity is the Mother of Invention They Say - How shall you shine?

    Have you ever been cornered into finding a uniquely NEW solution to a problem or challenge?

    Started by: PonyXpress Raves:8

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    Tell us about what stages of coping you may have experienced as you worked through a particularly tough problem, and what traits unique to you or your process helped you discover things that ultimately worked. Where do you get your ideas from? What should we do to jumpstart our own thinking? What tools do we need. What mindframe? Are there ways to combine thoughts that can lead to breakthroughs? What's the recipe for success!?

    I\\\'m convinced that NEW solutions are generally the results of \\\"moments of truth\\\" wherein old solutions (and assumptions) fail. To create new ideas, we need to provide environments where there is little homogeneity of world view, broad diversity of sensory feedback, and new opportunities for empiric learning. In essence, we need to develop environments that force \\\"childlike-ness.\\\"

    I\\\'m not proud of this at all, but since you said \\\"cornered,\\\" I\\\'ll admit that \\\"power leeching\\\" is sometimes a way to get by when you\\\'re on the go. You find an unguarded outlet somewhere and use it to recharge a battery while nobody is looking. It helps to put something down to block the line of sight, like a briefcase or shopping bag. Sometimes I use an empty cardboard box, kind of as a tribute to the Metal Gear Solid video games. I try not to do this in a way that would hurt the \\\"little guys\\\" though. I wouldn\\\'t leech from some homeowner\\\'s solar installation, for example. I hope I can come up with some solutions that are more noble than this.

    Sometimes the newest solution can be the simplest one that we neglect to consider. :)

    I am afraid I cannot entirely agree. Often a solution emerges from the subconcious over time. \\\'Sleeping on it\\\', as they say. I think that, aside from flashes of inspiration in emergency situations (which I understand could have an evolutionary base) most of the solutions I generate are the product of time. To answer the questions, I would suggest that obtaining all the information we can and then waiting for solutions is, in th long term, more beneifical, as it enables us to see both unseen problems and more creative solutions...

    Sleeping on it - is a wonderful suggestion and one I employ liberally, Apolobamba. In fact I keep an Idea Book next to my bed to catch morning brainstorms. IronMonkey, you seem to have a nimble flexibility with fiarness that could well allow you to make strong never-before-seen connections. A vluable asset in difficult times indeed. And 12pm, or as we say, Midnight, your expansive worldview of inclusiveness if exactly the sort of thinking that\\\'s going to allow for healthy change. I wonder what other thoughts will present themselves here.....we welcome them!

    With complete humble respect, I think recipes for success are inevitably our downfall. I think childlike play and Ironmonkey’s sleep wisdom. I think the question or the problem is often not understood or felt clearly so we cannot find an appropriate solution. By sleeping on it or allowing time to pass while the body is in creative or adrenalin fueled motion, the question filters through the body and begins to clarify itself in our somatic systems. Proprioception is muscle memory – the way we can play a piano piece we memorized in childhood but cannot now visualize the notes. The body may know what we consciously cannot articulate. So for example, I make art or construct models; these physical metaphors allow me to play with parallels between the issue and the artifact. By viewing the problem through various lenses and angles (what I call parallaxic praxis); we can develop individual lines of sight which have deep personal meaning. Collectively, if we put all those different lines together, and value them, we then are able to develop a confluence, a mainstem to approach the problem much more holistically. None of this is proven of course, so you best sleep on this idea first!

    for me, working through tough questions works best by changing my point of view. This can be physically, by changing surroundings, stimulating my thinking with new sounds, scents, sights. It can be mentally, by switching gears and applying an approach from a different discipline entirely. Trying to solve a problem based in the humanities, for example, by thinking of biological systems. Or approaching a biological conundrum as if it were an aesthetic puzzle. And also very valuable, trying to explain the problem to someone from such a different background (academic, cultural) that they don't even have the background to understand it. Being forced to put myself in their place, and think how to explain it in terms that are meaningful to them, can help me see it in a whole different light, and can reveal potential solutions I had not seen when I was caught within my own frame of reference.




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