For entrepreneurs, creativity is not simply a luxury, it’s an essential survival skill. Common entrepreneurial pitfalls include:
- Trying to do everything on your own
- Difficulty developing strategies or deciding where to focus your energy
- Neglecting to invest in yourself
- Falling in love with a venture and pursuing it without proper development
The key to avoiding these traps is understanding how you approach a challenge. The latest creativity research finds we all use our creativity in different ways, but follow a common problem-solving process. Once you understand the creative process, you can intentionally apply it, boosting your creativity and efficiency while strengthening your initiatives. It boils down to these four stages:
- Clarify the situation: We explore the issue at hand, find all relevant data that will help us make sense of it and figure out the most effective path to take to resolve it.
- Generate ideas: We come up with and select the best new ideas for making a change that best addresses the situation.
- Develop solutions: We tinker with those ideas until they are perfect, then break and rebuild them, and then polish them until they shine.
- Implement the solution: We put ideas into action by: gaining acceptance of the solution, helping people manage change and adapting solutions as needed.
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