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Solve Problems Like an Innovator
Practical methods—framing, divergent/convergent thinking, rapid prototyping, and validation—to produce testable solutions quickly for teams and small organizations.
Solve Problems Like an Innovator
Learn a practical, repeatable approach for turning unclear challenges into prioritized experiments and usable solutions—fast, with less wasted effort.
Why this matters
Most organizations have more ideas than time. The real skill is choosing the right problems, generating diverse options, and then quickly learning what works in the real world. This resource teaches a structured flow—from problem framing through divergent idea generation, convergent selection, lightweight prototypes, and simple validation—that helps teams shorten feedback loops and make better decisions.
What you will understand and practice
You’ll learn how to: frame problems so they are solvable; run divergent exercises that produce useful variety; use convergent methods to prioritize ideas against real constraints and criteria; build rapid, low-cost prototypes; and design quick customer or stakeholder tests that produce actionable learning. Practical exercises emphasize small experiments that limit risk and surface real evidence.
Who benefits
This resource is practical for team leads, product and service managers, small business owners, front-line supervisors, consultants, educators, and makers—anyone who must solve messy problems with limited time and resources. Examples include a café manager reducing food waste with low-cost process changes, a maintenance team prototyping a visual check system on the shop floor, or a nonprofit testing a new volunteer onboarding workflow.
How this fits with Becoming Your Best and The Hunger Engine
Becoming Your Best emphasizes continuous improvement and practical learning; this resource provides an innovation workflow you can use inside that larger practice. Within a Hunger Engine, the methods here can become reusable patterns, templates, and experiments that teams catalog, iterate, and share through librarians and collections. If you own or adapt the resource, you can tailor frames, tests, and templates to your industry and operations.
What to try next
Begin with a clear problem statement and a success metric you can observe. Run a short divergent session (20–60 minutes) to gather ideas, then converge on two or three candidates to prototype. Use low-cost prototypes or role-play to run quick tests and capture learning. The included Design Sprint & Rapid Validation Template can help structure those steps into a single workshop.
Start the Design Sprint & Rapid Validation Template or copy the template into your team’s Hunger Engine to tailor frames, forms, and experiments for your context.
Make useful resources part of something bigger.
The Hunger Engine is moving toward living domains, toolkits, and collections that people and organizations can explore, acquire, tailor, extend, and improve. A useful resource can become part of a personal collection, team toolbox, site-specific domain, or shared enterprise capability.
Start with what you're hungry to improve. As your needs grow, collections can bring together knowledge, audits, forms, dashboards, data, AI, integrations, and other capabilities without requiring you to start from scratch.