Featured Resource: Creative Approaches to Problem Solving (CAPS) Toolkit
By Dr. Lauren Tessier, Implementation Support
4-min read
If you work to create or support change, you know this is not a solitary process. In fact, its success hinges on a high degree of collaboration. However, in your change efforts, you may also have found (or are currently finding) that making the space and finding the time for true collaboration can prove challenging, particularly in resource-constrained environments, where those working to make a change happen may not be doing so full-time. Whether this is the case you find yourself in, or whether you work in a space where there are dedicated resources to support change, it can also be easy to become results-focused, motivated to “achieve” that elusive end state where something has been implemented, or a change has been made. When this happens, we can become task-oriented and fall back on familiar ways of working and approaching a problem in the service of getting the work done. While being results-driven has its merits, we must remember that implementation is ultimately an ongoing process that requires a mix of hard and soft skills, and truly honoring this process sometimes means taking more time than we might otherwise to enable collaboration and creativity to flourish. This is where the Creative Approaches to Problem Solving (CAPS) Toolkit comes in.
The CAPS Toolkit was developed by The Health Foundation’s Q and currently consists of 25 tried and tested methods to support creative collaboration and problem-solving. Within the Toolkit, these methods are grouped according to different objectives, including:
Gaining insight and input to help inform decision-making.
Seeking new perspectives to spark alternative thinking.
Reframing a problem to open up new ways of looking at it.
Harnessing new ideas to brainstorm different solutions.
Prioritising solutions to make decisions about how to move forward.
For example, here are the activities provided for gaining insight and input to help inform decision-making.
These activities can be used in a variety of different settings including meetings, workshops and team retreats. For example, we have been hearing interest in using empathy mapping in implementation science. This toolkit provides an overview of how to do that.
We’ve also been hearing there is a lot of interest in different kinds of prioritization methods people can use, so we really appreciate that this toolkit presents 9 prioritization solutions.
In addition to providing a detailed overview of how to set up and run each activity, the Toolkit also provides valuable tips on collaboration etiquette. These tips range from “keep it simple”, to avoid exhausting collaborators, to considerations surrounding trust and power, given the profound impact these have on collaboration and its fruitfulness. If trust and power are concepts you are interested in exploring more, we also offer a course on these.
Whether you are actively working on change or not, the CAPS Toolkit provides a host of creative ideas to help switch up the way you engage and collaborate with people. While these are not methods you would need all of the time, their use provides opportunity and necessitates the creation of space where innovation can happen. We have taken cues and ideas from this resource and highly recommend you take the time to explore it too – you never know where inspiration may strike.
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