Supercharged Problem-Solving

It was the best kind of problem: Missionary applications spiked by more than 400 percent in the weeks following the October 2012 minimum-age change, Missionary Training Centers (MTCs) were maxed out, and Ross Storey was asked to get creative.

“We were charged with rethinking missionary training from start to finish,” says Storey, then a curriculum development manager who went on to become manager of missionary experience for the Church. “You can imagine the questions that came up.” Among them: How might they do without an MTC altogether?

By the end of 2013, Storey had delivered the concepts and designs for a mobile-ready, fully remote MTC experience—which came in handy during a global pandemic seven years later.

Storey is quick to credit his team and how they deployed the creative problem-solving tactics he had honed during his career working for Fortune 500 companies and startups. Storey now teaches—make that preaches—these tactics as an associate teaching professor in BYU Marriott’s experience design and management program.

He’s not alone. Storey is just one voice in a chorus of faculty members who are emphatic about developing the problem-solving prowess to meet wicked problems with wild ideas. As Degan Kettles, BYU Marriott associate teaching professor of information systems, puts it, “Problem-solving is the most important skill in the job market.” It’s also a growth area for BYU grads, who, according to Jeff Dyer, a professor in the strategy program, have historically scored higher in categories such as ethics but lower in creativity and challenging the status quo.

How can individuals better approach complex problems? How are creative workplaces cultivated? And how do the world’s most innovative leaders help their teams? Here, we cherry-pick BYU Marriott for research and practical tips on how to unleash creative genius both professionally and personally.

Start with Two “Storms”

Virtually every problem-solving framework begins with defining the problem. Dyer, who spent eight years meticulously studying the world’s most innovative organizations—Amazon, Apple, and the like—says you first need to nail the problem, and he proposes “questionstorming” (brainstorming questions) to do it.

A simple example: Maybe initially you are trying to improve the experience of ironing clothes, he says, but through questioning, it becomes clear that the job to be done is producing a pressed shirt—which could be resolved many ways.

Barrage the problem with questions: Give it the who, what, where, when, and why. Aim for 20 or more, and don’t forget “Why not?” and “What if?” Questioning your problem invites curiosity, and it can expose important unknowns. You may identify a problem that eclipses the original. “There are questions you need answers to before you’ll be able to get to an effective and a creative solution,” says Dyer. It’s zooming out before zooming in.

Brainstorming potential solutions should be equally expansive. Many are familiar with divergent and convergent thinking; Storey worries that we aren’t divergent enough. “Too often, groupthink happens,” he explains. Depending on the hierarchy and personalities in the room, one idea quickly snowballs.

Brainstorm right, says Storey, by setting some ground rules. Everyone comes prepared with ideas. “The key is they come having thought about the problem before they hear everyone else’s ideas.” And everyone shares “an equal privilege,” he says, with a nod to Doctrine and Covenants 88:122. “There are quiet people who spend more time inside their heads. Those people often have some of the best ideas.”

Perhaps most important, Storey says, is to keep the room supportive. If people can share without fear of retribution or judgment, “the likelihood for sharing wild ideas is much higher.”

Wild—and wildly different—ideas are the goal. Storey cites the Torrance Tests for Creative Thinking, which contends that the quality of the final solution depends on how many ideas—especially unique ideas—are generated.¹ How you frame the session can grease the wheels: Try a hackathon or a creative sprint. The idea is to take the pressure off, to make room for experimentation, he says. Another boon: diversity. “Tons of research supports this,” says Storey, who notes the importance of “having diverse skill sets and backgrounds in the room.”

Trade Seats, Trade Insights

One of the best ways to prime the pump for creativity, says Dyer, is to observe others responding to similar problems.

Google and Procter & Gamble, Dyer learned through his research, systematically did departmental swaps, sending their marketing and HR people to other companies for four to six weeks to study their best practices. These “observing excursions,” says Dyer, “provide opportunities to gain insights into new ways of doing things.” He encourages looking for surprises and breakthroughs by asking: “What’s different from what you expected?”

Another approach is to seek input from frontline employees. They hold a trove of insights but are often overlooked by company leaders. Put frontline employees in situations where they can see the broader business environment, says Kettles. “If you’re interacting with customers and hearing what executives are worried about, you start to see where there are opportunities for you to add value.”

Finally, focus on the customer experience. Tuning in to your customers is a major tenet of design thinking, which Storey teaches at BYU Marriott. The framework prioritizes gathering “empathy data, getting in the customer’s shoes,” says Storey. At multiple points while reworking the MTC format, he would pull a missionary into the meeting. “You want the user’s voice in your head. The better you understand their thoughts and their needs, the more you can fully experience their feelings and the more likely you will find creative solutions—and the right solutions.”

Stoke Creativity

It’s hard to let the right brain tackle a problem without the left brain chirping about practicalities and constraints. Storey has tricks to let the creativity flow.

A favorite: the Stanford Stoke Deck—a free online tool created by the university’s design school.² It’s a virtual deck of cards, each outlining a short icebreaker activity to boost collaboration and engagement in a group. “I’ll do it in class if our energy is low,” says Storey. “It gets our brains fired up.”

He also advises tossing a ball around as a team, walking together—any kind of movement—while problem-solving; Apple CEO Steve Jobs was known to hold walking meetings or hit the pavement when something stymied him for more than 10 minutes. “If you can occupy your subconscious brain with activity, you can actually be more focused, more creative,” says Storey. It’s a research-backed strategy:
Movement—especially when it happens outdoors—gives ideas legs.³

To that end, plan an off-site retreat, says Storey. “Get your people out of their usual space. Get out in the wilderness.” Work hard, break hard, so to speak—ideas often come during what psychology calls the incubation period, when you’ve stepped away from the problem (such as that flash of clarity in the shower).

Remember that creative problem-solving is deep work, Storey adds; shallow work is often easily repeated and can be done in a distracted environment. Creativity can’t be done on cue. To facilitate deep work, try timeboxing, he says. “Block off a dedicated amount of time to allow you to deeply focus.” He even prohibits phones in such a space. “If you’re in the middle of a creative endeavor and you get interrupted, it can take 20 minutes or more to recover that lost momentum.”

Be Psyched to Solve

One asterisk here, and it’s a big one: Your organization’s culture may be putting the freeze on creativity.

It starts at the top, says John Bingham, professor of organizational behavior. “Many leaders feel they have to be the innovation chiefs,” he says, but there is no turf to protect here; the most innovative firms draw on the knowledge at every rung, “the innovative potential of employees doing the work.”

Rigid cultures also stem from a lack of “procedural justice”—the fairness and transparency of how decisions are made within the company. Bingham’s research suggests that procedural justice drives collaborative problem-solving.⁴ If people feel undervalued, unheard, or disrespected, Bingham says, they’ll often do the bare minimum. Create an environment of support and transparency and the tables turn—people are “more willing to persist with problems, to work harder, to be more creative, to collaborate with coworkers,” Bingham says. “And that is what organizations today need desperately.”

What does procedural justice look like? Leadership explaining decisions and providing channels to challenge or give feedback—not just in a group setting but one-to-one.

According to Bingham’s research, ensuring that every employee has a “line of sight” to the firm’s strategic goals can also help.⁵ “There’s something really powerful about a rank-and-file employee understanding how we create value and win as a company and how they specifically contribute,” he says.

Practices that invite two-way communication help create “psychological safety,” a parallel topic coined in Harvard Business School research and cited heavily by BYU Marriott experts.⁶

“Psychological safety is the new catchphrase for building the foundations of trust,” says Storey. “It’s having teams who watch each other’s backs, care about each other’s lives, and assume the best intentions.” This environment creates a kind of nirvana from which teams can tackle problems. People on psychologically safe teams are more willing to take risks, he says, be it experimenting with a new idea, surfacing concerns, or disagreeing.

As this safety increases the flow of feedback, could the volume of ideas become overwhelming? “It all comes down to leaders within teams,” says Bingham. It’s essential to train supervisors to “draw out those insights, distill the best information, and elevate it toward execution.”

Develop a Culture of Candor

Dyer can’t underscore the importance of disagreement enough. In an article for MIT Sloan Management Review, he advocates for psychological safety but points out that it often comes at the expense of intellectual honesty, which leads to better solutions.⁷ Safe, cohesive teams are great at generating ideas, but ideas are refined only through honest evaluation, says Dyer. The best solutions require candor.

Take Pixar: In Ed Catmull’s book Creativity Inc., he expounds on how Pixar prioritizes incisive feedback to make its films better. Or take Amazon, where employees and teams are expected to be candid, says Dyer, “even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it’s exhausting, even when it’s with Jeff Bezos.”

Dyer details how Amazon’s former head of retail, Jeff Wilke, was unafraid to voice his qualms to Bezos and the board about developing the Kindle—a sign of psychological safety. Wilke’s concerns deepened the discussion with valuable intellectual honesty.

How can organizations move toward this kind of culture? Draw out healthy debate, says Dyer. “As a leader, ask others to disagree and explain why that’s helpful and model how to do it.” He makes that a practice as a YSA ward bishop. “I tell my ward council, ‘I like it when you disagree with me because that means you have different information.’” By disagreeing respectfully, he says, “we can get to a better solution.”

Break the Box

“There are organically creative people,” says Kettles. He sees them coming through his classes. “But there are a lot more people who need coaxing, preparation, and practice.”

The good news: Practice works. Anyone can cultivate creative problem-solving skills, say the experts. If you’re ready to start, try these tactics.

First, give yourself permission to think outside the box. It sounds basic, but Dyer has even run experiments on this: MBA groups that are directed, specifically, to be creative in solving a case study—to really reach for a novel solution—outperformed their counterparts, as judged by independent evaluators. “Teams were much more likely to come up with something novel when I legitimized that it was okay to think outside the box,” says Dyer.

Next, network. Dyer’s research reveals that this is one of the top skills of the world’s best innovators. But instead of networking for resources, network for ideas. “It’s really fast; it’s efficient,” says Dyer. “Reach out to a lot of different types of people to get their perspective on an issue or a problem.”

Third, write down questions every morning for a few weeks about the challenges you’re facing. Better yet, make it an ongoing practice. Dyer taught this principle in a workshop, and an executive MBA attendee circled back four months later to report the ripple effect. “His boss came to him and said, ‘There’s something different about you. You’re a more strategic thinker. You’re helping us address important issues.’” The same EMBA student reported a promotion a few months later. “And the only thing he knew that he was doing differently was writing these questions down,” notes Dyer.

Storey adds two final takes: the importance of a growth mindset and a willingness to fail. “Some people see a glass half full, some half empty,” he says. “Be the person who is instead focused on, How do I get more water?” Then allow “a dumb idea” along the way. “Trying something that is a total bust is really important,” says Storey. It informs the next prototype. “Focus on the growth, the opportunity to learn.”

And don’t be afraid of your wild ideas, continues Storey. Going back to his MTC revamp, he cites the solution for training missionaries who have autism and may suffer from severe social anxiety. “Ultimately we gave the Church the wild idea to give them a personal tutor,” says Storey. “It’s wild because it’s exceptionally expensive,” he admits, but it worked best, and “it made sense with the mission of the Church. And that’s what they now do.”

At any stage, they could have doused the idea and “inadvertently put out the creative flame before it went anywhere,” says Storey. Fan your creative endeavors. Deliberately. “Culture either emerges or it is crafted. And usually if it emerges, it’s not the culture you necessarily want.” In Storey’s world, a creative culture isn’t just welcomed—it’s designed.

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Aye Aye to Risk

The task: Make Microsoft’s latest Xbox game, Sea of Thieves, stand out at the video game industry’s biggest trade event at the time, the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3).

“This was right when game streaming was becoming a thing,” says Brandon Wells, a BYU Marriott MBA alum and now a director of global product marketing at Microsoft. For the 2016 Sea of Thieves trailer, his team broke from tradition, live streaming the game to show the gamers themselves on E3’s big screens.

Internal reviews nearly killed the out-of-box idea, but Wells and his colleagues fought for it. And the E3 crowd ate it up. “In a show of back-to-back game trailers, ours stood out,” says Wells.

Creative solutions are inherently risky, acknowledges Wells. “Take risks when you firmly believe in them. Whenever somebody comes to me now with an idea that they’re passionate about, I have learned to worry less about corporate structure and think more about, ‘Is this right for our product? Is this right for our consumer?’”

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A Win-Win

After working at KPMG and then in private equity, MAcc grad Greg Christopher struck out on his own to consult for growing businesses.

In his work, Christopher, founder of Boosted Books, discovered that the small business community was often underserved because they had difficulty finding competent bookkeepers. Even after redesigning his firm for bottom-up accounting, hiring remained tough—domestic talent was costly, and offshore training was inconsistent. His breakthrough? A mentor pointed Christopher toward a talent pool he hadn’t considered before: BYU–Pathway grads.

As BYU–Pathway launched a vertical to help grads start accounting careers, Christopher partnered with the program to develop a training pipeline that includes full-time roles at Boosted Books. Now he employs BYU–Pathway grads from all over the world. It’s not just solving the problems of small businesses, Christopher says. “I can give someone in Africa a stable work opportunity. It’s an underserved population serving an underserved population.”

Building the model has been a refinement process. “You don’t solve the problem the first time,” he says. “You keep talking to other people. You listen and observe. You act and then you iterate.”

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Don’t Copy and Paste

Problems often land in familiar categories or buckets—even across clients from different industries, says Eden Peterson, a BYU MBA alum and management consultant at PwC. “It’s easy to fall into, ‘Okay, we’ve seen this before,’” she says, “and jump right to solutioning.”

The problem-solving process she touts: Stop and ask some good questions and resist the instinct to treat similar problems in the same way. After wrapping a recent organizational redesign for a pharmaceutical company, Peterson dove into a near-replica issue for a hospitality chain. But her go-to questions—“Who is my audience?” and “What unique situations do they face?”—revealed unexpected nuances. For one, frontline hospitality workers take a lot of flack. “Guests are not usually nice,” she says. That insight shaped PwC’s advice, especially around how leaders support frontline staff.

Peterson realized that her team would have solved the problem incorrectly if they had assumed that hospitality employees were as autonomous as pharmaceutical employees. “Questioning and deep thinking always make for better work outputs,” she says.

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Written by Brittany Rogers

Illustrations by Antonio Sortino

About the Author

Brittany Rogers, a freelance writer in American Fork, Utah, is locked in a creative problem-solving duel with her three-year-old, who keeps finding new ways to release the neighbor’s bunnies.

Notes

1. See E. P. Torrance and Z. L. Rockenstein, “Styles of Thinking and Creativity,” in Learning Strategies and Learning Styles, ed. Ronald R. Schmeck (Plenum Press, 1988), 275–90, link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4899-2118-5_10.
2. Taylor Cone, Tania Anaissie, and Ashish Goel, Stoke Deck, version 2.0, 2019, stokedeck.io/.
3. See Marily Oppezzo and Daniel L. Schwartz, “Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 40, no. 4 (July 2014): 1142–52, apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xlm-a0036577.pdf.
4. See Haiyang Li, John B. Bingham, and Elizabeth E. Umphress, “Fairness from the Top: Perceived Procedural Justice and Collaborative Problem Solving in New Product Development,” Organization Science 18, no. 2 (March–April 2007): 200-216, pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/orsc.1060.0231.
5. Wendy R. Boswell, John B. Bingham, and Alexander J. S. Colvin, “Aligning Employees Through ‘Line of Sight,’” Business Horizons 49, no. 6 (November–December 2006): 499–509, doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2006.05.001.
6. Amy Edmondson, “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams,” Administrative Science Quarterly 44, no. 2 (Sage Publications, June 1999): jstor.org/stable/2666999.
7. See Jeff Dyer, Nathan Furr, Curtis Lefrandt, and Taeya Howell, “Why Innovation Depends on Intellectual Honesty,” MIT Sloan Management Review 64, no. 3 (Spring 2023): 66–72, sloanreview.mit.edu/article/why-innovation-depends-on-intellectual-honesty/.