Advice

What Firefighters Know About Creative Problem Solving That Your MBA Never Taught You

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Three months ago, I watched a mate of mine—let's call him Dave—literally save his entire marketing department from redundancy using a technique he learnt during his volunteer firefighting days. Not some fancy Harvard Business School framework. Not design thinking. Not even a proper brainstorming session.

He used what firefighters call "surround and drown."

Dave's team was haemorrhaging clients faster than water through a broken dam. Management had given them six weeks to turn things around or face the axe. Instead of panicking or throwing more resources at the same failed strategies, Dave applied his firefighting logic: sometimes you don't attack the fire directly. You cut off its fuel supply.

They stopped chasing new clients entirely. Instead, they spent four weeks figuring out why existing clients were leaving. Turned out, it wasn't their campaigns that were rubbish—it was their invoicing system that took three weeks to process simple changes. By the time management expected their turnaround plan, they'd already retained 80% of their at-risk clients simply by fixing their back-end processes.

That's creative problem solving. Not the jazz hands, sticky notes on whiteboards version that most corporate trainers peddle.

The Problem with Problem Solving Training

Here's what drives me mental about most creative problem solving approaches: they're designed by people who've never actually had to solve real problems under pressure. They're academic exercises wrapped in business jargon.

I've sat through countless workshops where facilitators—usually fresh-faced consultants who've never run so much as a corner store—explain the "seven steps to effective problem solving" or some variation thereof. Step one: define the problem. Step two: gather information. Step three: generate alternatives.

Bollocks.

Real problems don't wait for your seven-step process. Real problems are messy, urgent, and usually involve people behaving irrationally. When your biggest client threatens to walk because someone in accounts sent them the wrong invoice format for the third time running, you don't need a framework. You need creative thinking that works in real time.

The best problem solvers I know—and I've worked with hundreds over the past seventeen years—don't follow frameworks at all. They follow instincts developed through experience, failure, and a healthy disrespect for conventional wisdom.

What Actually Works (And Why Nobody Teaches It)

Let me share something that might ruffle some feathers: the most effective creative problem solving happens when you deliberately ignore the obvious solution.

Take Sarah from accounting. Not exactly who you'd peg as a creative type, right? Last year, our office in Brisbane was losing money hand over fist. Rent was killing us, but breaking the lease would cost even more. Sarah's solution? She convinced the landlord to let us sublet half our space to a complementary business—a design agency that needed exactly what we had: meeting rooms, reception services, and professional address credibility.

Now we're making money on our rent instead of bleeding it. The design agency gets premium facilities at half price. Everyone wins. Sarah didn't use any fancy problem-solving methodology. She just asked herself: "What if the problem isn't the cost, but how we're thinking about the space?"

That's the secret sauce right there. Creative problem solving isn't about generating more options—it's about questioning your assumptions about what the actual problem is.

The Three Rules Nobody Talks About

After nearly two decades of watching people succeed and fail at solving workplace problems, I've noticed three patterns that separate the genuinely creative problem solvers from the framework followers:

Rule One: Start with the constraint, not the goal. Most people begin with "How do we increase sales?" Creative problem solvers start with "Given that we can't hire more staff, can't increase our marketing budget, and can't change our product line, how might we approach this differently?"

Constraints force creativity. Freedom paralyses it.

Rule Two: Assume your first three ideas are wrong. I don't care how brilliant you think you are. Your initial solutions are almost always variations on what you've tried before. The good stuff—the genuinely creative solutions—live in ideas four through seven.

This is why brainstorming sessions usually produce garbage. Everyone gets excited about the first decent idea and stops pushing further. Real creative problem solving requires intellectual endurance.

Rule Three: Test the opposite. Whatever conventional wisdom says about your problem, try the exact reverse and see what happens. If everyone says you need to cut costs, ask what would happen if you increased spending in specific areas. If the standard response is to add more people, explore how you might solve it with fewer.

Some of my best consulting wins have come from suggesting clients do the opposite of what their industry considers best practice.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

Look, I'll be honest—creative problem solving has become a bit of a buzzword lately. Every second LinkedIn post seems to be about "thinking outside the box" or "innovative solutions." Most of it's rubbish.

But here's the thing: the problems we're facing in workplaces today are genuinely different from what previous generations dealt with. Remote teams, constantly changing technology, supply chain disruptions, staff shortages—these aren't problems you solve with standard operating procedures.

You need people who can think laterally under pressure. Who can spot patterns across different industries and apply insights from completely unrelated fields. Who can make decisions with incomplete information and adapt quickly when those decisions prove wrong.

That's not a nice-to-have skill anymore. It's survival.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Innovation

Here's something that might annoy some people: most workplace innovation doesn't come from innovation labs or dedicated R&D departments. It comes from ordinary people getting frustrated with inefficient processes and finding better ways to do things.

The best improvements I've seen in organisations have come from receptionists who streamlined appointment systems, warehouse staff who redesigned storage layouts, and customer service reps who identified recurring complaint patterns that management had missed.

These people weren't trained in creative problem solving. They were just paying attention and weren't afraid to suggest that maybe—just maybe—there was a better way.

Making It Practical

If you're serious about developing creative problem solving skills (and not just collecting certificates), here's what actually works:

Spend time in industries completely different from your own. I learnt more about customer service from working weekends at a farmers' market than from any professional development course. The constraints are different, the pace is different, and the consequences of poor service are immediate and visible.

Question everything, especially things that "everyone knows" are true. Why do meetings have to be an hour? Why do reports need to be monthly? Why do we always hire people with specific qualifications for certain roles?

Most importantly, get comfortable with being wrong. The people who solve problems creatively aren't smarter than everyone else—they're just less attached to being right the first time.

The Bottom Line

Creative problem solving isn't a skill you learn from a textbook or a weekend workshop. It's a mindset you develop through practice, failure, and paying attention to how the world actually works rather than how it's supposed to work.

Dave's marketing team is still together, by the way. They're actually expanding. Not because they became brilliant at marketing overnight, but because they learnt to ask better questions about what their real problems were.

Sometimes the most creative solution is the simplest one. Sometimes it's the most complex. But it's always the one that nobody else thought to try.

And that, more than any framework or methodology, is what creative problem solving is really about.

Looking to develop your team's problem-solving capabilities? Check out our strategic thinking and analytical training programs designed for real-world application, not just theory.