Creative Thinking Strategy 1: Knowing How to See

Genius comes from finding new perspective on problems. The Fishbone Diagram, developed by Professor Kaoru Ishikawa of Tokyo University, is a creative thinking technique used to find new perspectives by visually organizing and examining both major and minor causes of a problem posed.

Results, lessons learned, identified solutions:

When doing this fishbone diagram it wasn’t too hard to come up with major causes as they relate to my overall problem; however, it wasn’t easy coming up with minor problems. I really had to think about what it was that we weren’t doing because the real problem is that there just isn’t enough recruitment and marketing being done in general. What specifically is the cause of this major problem? That’s the question I asked myself most when trying to think up specific, minor causes.

When looking at the completed fishbone diagram, it’s clear there are a number of major and minor problems associated with how CAPs recruit for getting qualified applicants. No online and little physical marketing are the two most obvious major problems as they relate to getting qualified students to apply for the job. That said, trouble targeting large quantities of qualified students, and not hosting events for potential candidates are equally important major problems.

My initial response to this diagrams results is that we need to do more of everything. I hope to find some more creative recruiting ideas in other creative thinking techniques, but this diagram was useful in that it made me think about all the problems I need to tackle when coming up with creative solutions.