Yesterday I was speaking at an event in Grand Rapids. I came down early to catch the speaker before me, and I noticed he was having mic issues.

Clicks.
Hisses.
Loud pops.
It was rough.

Luckily, the guy was a pro. He turned off his mic, projected his booming voice throughout the room, and went on as though it was no big deal.

Since I was up next, the client pulled me out into the hall for a quick debrief with his team.

“As you can see, we’re having some AV issues.” he said. “The hotel says they’re working on it, but we wanted to talk through our options.”

So that’s what we did.

We talked about the pros and cons of going without a mic entirely (the room was small enough that you could project, but just barely). We talked about bringing in a smaller, karaoke-style sound system (risky, because I knew I would be tempted to sing Wonderwall). But the four of us threw out a whole bunch of other ideas, too:

• “What if we grab a stack of coffee cups from the lobby, find a roll of string somewhere, and set up individual can phones that go to each participant?”
• “What if we have everyone hop on a zoom call and turn their volume up?”
• “What if we grab some poster board and make a giant megaphone like cheerleaders use?”

These were obviously jokes, but they brought up an interesting thought: nothing gets creative juices flowing like a practical problem.

Oftentimes when people say “I’m not the creative type”, they really mean “I don’t usually just come up with ideas for the fun of it.”
But those same people, if you give them a practical problem to solve, suddenly manage to get real creative.

That makes sense, too. After all, creativity is just a fancy word for problem solving.

An idea is a way of solving a problem, whether that problem is “I need something beautiful to hang on my wall”, “I need to find a way to get my business to profitability by the end of the month”, or “I need to figure out how to make sure everyone can hear the keynote speaker.”

If you want to start getting more ideas out of the people around you, start giving them specific problems to solve.
The more specific, the better.

• “How could we serve our customers better?” is a problem, but it’s not particularly specific.
• ”How could we improve our onboarding process?” is more specific.
• ”How could we get customers onboarded in half the time it currently takes?” is even better.

The same thing works for your own creative blocks. Get really specific on the problem and you’ll find that it’s much easier to find the solutions.

Happy Friday, friends. Make it a good one.

Kyle Scheele
Helping Launch Better Ideas, Faster
​www.KyleScheele.com​

P.S. My next book, How Ideas Work, gets really practical on how to define the problem you’re trying to solve, how to find the pieces you need to solve it, and how to get that solution out into the world where it can make the biggest difference. Preorder your copy today!​