Chapter 5 Creative Problem Solving after 50

Once you have identified your creative talents and the conditions where they thrive, you can then use them to redefine decisions, address the challenges, generate more options, and help outgrow outworn mental models. You may also benefit from a creative problem solving process as you do so. Here are some steps you can follow.
Step #1: Define the Challenge Creatively
In making decisions in the past, you may have, consciously or not, limited your ability to find new solutions. Why? The reason is often because you did not define the challenge broadly enough. Past decisions may have been limited to ’it’s either this option or that one’ or ’it’s a true or false choice’ or a ’right or wrong’ one. In your hurry to make the decision, you may have been quick to jump to conclusions. You may have become so locked into your judgments that you did not take the time to explore all options or you refused to see anything that did not fit with preconceived notions. These narrow criteria may have limited your ability to draw on your creativity. Midlife is the time to think expansively about choices and to explore more options. But, it is not always easy to do. For example, if you believe the only alternative in the face of a merger, downsizing, or request for early retirement is to leave, you may be stuck. When you think ‘how can I make this change work for me?’ rather than ’there is no way I am going to do that,' you can change your attitude and start to think creatively.
To ensure you are looking at situations expansively and differently, you want to take time to gather the facts and look at the situation from a variety of perspectives, those that stretch boundaries and escape the trap of conventional thinking of your prevailing mental models. You also need to reassess your assumptions. In the face of a downsizing, you may realize you no longer really want a full-time job or that you can offer your services as a consultant. You can then take the corporate decision to downsize as an opportunity to meet your own needs.
As you reframe the problem, it is important to watch out for any outworn mental models that may get in your way. Mental models that were successful in the past and once proven ways to solve problems do not always continue to work. You can get too close to a problem, and your prior experience can prevent you from seeing new facts and developments. Your own established rules can limit your perception of possible options and can insulate you from new information and narrow your perceptions. If you see nonprofit work as “charity work,” for example, or believe you will do no more than lick envelopes, you are limiting your options unnecessarily.

Step #2: Ask Creative Questions
The way you ask questions is fundamental to how you perceive, think, feel, and make decisions. The differences in attitude underneath questions like ’What's wrong?’ vs. ’What could work?’ or ’Why bother?’ vs. ’What's possible?’ are profound and can lead you down very different paths. Your internal questions need to shift as well from ’Why did I do such a stupid thing?’ to ’What can I learn from this situation?’
Therefore, another step you can take to help creative decision-making after 50 is to ask more creative questions. Probing questions challenge negative thinking patterns. You can open up your possibilities with creative questions, such as: ‘What is the ideal situation?’ ‘Are there new criteria to consider?’ ‘Are there different ways to make it happen?’ With a more positive outlook generated by more creative questions, you can see decisions with fresh eyes, broaden their scope, set your curiosity and creativity in motion, and be inspired with new possibilities.
Opening up new choices for yourself requires asking new questions. These new questions need to be bold in order to widen the perception of the possible. Here are some positive questions to use when facing particular midlife challenges.
What am I trying to achieve?
How does this decision fit into the larger scheme of things?
How can I see the decision or the problem differently?
How would (fill in the blank with a hero, heroine, role model, cartoon character) see this challenge?
What would I like to see happen?
What does the ideal result or choice look like?
What possibilities do I see coming out of this?
What alternatives and options exist?
What can be done to make what I am trying to do work?
What choices do I want to consider?
How can I prepare for the worst that could happen?

Step #3: Generate Creative Alternatives
After you have broadly defined a decision and let go of unneeded baggage or outworn mental models, it is time in the creative decision-making process to generate multiple options. Friends and colleagues with totally different perspectives on life can enrich your perspectives. Creative tools include such techniques as brainstorming, writing out options and answers to the creative questions and then building on them through journaling, using graphic techniques like mindmapping, or kinesthetic tools like sensanation can be very helpful. (For more information on these techniques, you might check out the books and techniques by Michael Michalko at http://www.creativethinkingwith.com/Michael-Michalko-Creative-Thinking-Techniques.html or the website of the Creative Thinking Association: http://www.creativethinkingassoc.com/store/ )
These techniques and other tools can twist paradigms, stretch the imagination, generate unexpected insights, gather different information, and eliminate the blinders of outdated mental models. By stretching your horizons, these tools can help you stay open to new input. They provide time and space for playfulness and good humor where you can be inventive and nonlinear, a time to try unusual combinations and different ways to tinker with ideas.
After 50, you may not only need new tools but also new sources of inspiration. Ideas may come from new activities, such as taking a trip on a train with a notebook and pen, new forms of exercise like jogging or tai chi, or physical chores such as working on the deck, mowing the lawn, or doing odd jobs around the house. Revisiting your childhood to search for the magic that inspired your youth can also lead to new insight. Did you enjoy writing stories? Were books sacred? Did you like going to museums or playing the piano? Going back to those special childhood moments can rekindle neglected or forgotten interests.
Ideas can come from a logical extension of ongoing activities, by building on current interests. As you browse the newspaper, scan TV programs, or wander through shops, you can find themes that capture your attention and interests. Art, photography, dance and music classes might surface unknown outlets for your creativity as well as new perspectives in your decision-making process. Other sources of inspiration can be taking a long bath, going for a walk, and visiting museums or botanical gardens.
Another technique for generating new insights is to schedule down time to “incubate,” or process and reflect on new ideas and allow for time away from the problem. Such incubation can facilitate the work of your memory and your unconscious. (Judy, memory and our unconscious are not the same thing from what I understand so I put that deletion back in!) Accessing the unconscious uncovers new ideas and imaginative and innovative solutions. Techniques such as meditation, relaxation, prayer, dreamwork, visualization, artwork, and movement can activate the unconscious for inspiration and guidance.
Step #4: Creatively Select the Best Solution and Direction
After generating options, whatever the source of the inspiration, the next step is to select the best solutions. Our research identified three possible ways for creatively selecting a creative solution: 1) trying a style different from ones you have used in the past; 2) finding a solution that integrates seemingly conflicting objectives, and 3) using experimentation to explore the solution in small steps.
1) In making selections among options, you may be used to evaluating possible ideas against your goals and objectives in a methodical way. Your style, on the other hand, may be to wait to until the idea feels right and be more spontaneous. You may want to consider that midlife should be the time when you change your decision-making style. If in the past you have always moved quickly to resolution, now might be a good time to resist the temptation to leap to the first solution and instead wait until you have explored ideas or revisit the criteria that you are using before you land on a solution. Or, conversely, if you have always been extremely methodical in your approach to decision-making, now may be the time to be more spontaneous.
2) As you start to narrow down alternatives, it’s important to see them as broadly as possible. Often decisions appear to require compromise because of conflicting options. Yet, in actuality the most creative solution is often one that comes from integrating opposing needs and ideas. If you have generated multiple options, you might be able to find a ‘both/and’ outcome that reconciles differences, instead of making a ‘black/white’ ‘either/or’ choice. An integrated solution does not determine which piece of the pie is yours; it creates a larger pie with all the necessary ingredients. For example, a commuter marriage may be a creative solution to the dilemma of balancing job opportunities with a change in locations. A part-time job may provide the financing that allows pursuit of a new hobby or interest. A weekly date may resolve the need for togetherness in a marriage if midlife avocations lead each partner in different directions.
3) Another creative approach to selecting the best solution is to try one or more on for size. Experimentation can be a way to minimize second-guessing, avoid possible loss of security, and limit analysis paralysis when you are trying something new. You can try out a new role gradually, perhaps through volunteering. You can develop a new idea in stages or build in options in case the original plan doesn’t work. You can try out new ideas while employed or at least get training in some areas of interest. You must be willing to adjust your dreams, to adapt, and to recognize that you don’t have to have all the answers before you get started.
[What tools have you used to generate more creative options? Any techniques that you have followed that have helped in your decision-making process after 50? Have you ever tried to change your decision-making mode? Have you tried to find an integrated solution (vs. a compromise that doesn’t satisfy anyone)? Have you tried experimenting with a new direction? If so, what was the outcome of any of these endeavors?]