Gregg Fraley - Jacks Notebook: A Business Novel about Creative Problem Solving

Praise for
JACKS NOTEBOOK

Both innovative and inspirational, Jacks Notebook swings open a long-neglected door to the creative process. All of us are creative, but many of us do not know how to access our creativity. Like James Redfields Celestine Prophecy, Gregg Fraley uses story to convey principles that deserve a wide audience.

Julia Cameron
The Artists Way

Gregg Fraleys idea of teaching creativity principles using a novel is fascinating; the story he tells is engaging. Its unique and exciting. Jacks Notebook will bring creative thinking and creative problem solving skills to a much broader audience.

Sidney Parnes, Ph.D.
Developer with Alex Osborn of the
Creative Problem Solving (CPS) process

Rather than relying on divine intervention to solve your challenges, read Jacks Notebook. This book cleverly teaches you how to build the skill of deliberate creative problem solving. This is crucial for thriving in todays volatile age of change.

Stephen Shapiro
Author, 24/7 Innovation and Goal-Free Living

Story and metaphor can make the imponderable ponderable, the impossible possible, and the improbable probable. Using the framework of creative problem solving, Jacks Notebook does exactly that. It is the quintessential, user-friendly guidebook to living a life of creative possibilities that transform into realities. In simpler words, I know this guy. I work with him. He uses this stuff. His dreams happen. It works. Buy this book.

Doug Stevenson
Partner in The Innovise Guys podcast
AllCreation.net

The processes of making ideas a reality have made creativity and innovation hot topics in the prevailing world economies. However, few people have the gift of making creative process accessible and readily applicable to all. Gregg Fraleys deep knowledge of creative problem solving, his gift of storytelling, and his wonderful humor come together in this compelling novel. And Jacks Notebook gives fresh breath to a topic that otherwise could be very dry and academic. It leaves you feeling good about your own creativity and wanting to practice what you have learned from Jacks trials and tribulations well before you read the last word.

David Magellan Horth
Center for Creative Leadership
Coauthor of The Leaders Edge

Copyright 2007 by Gregg Fraley

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Thomas Nelson, Inc. titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail SpecialMarkets@ThomasNelson.com.

Publishers Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the authors imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fraley, Gregg.
Jack's notebook : a business novel about creative problem solving /
Gregg Fraley.
p. cm.
ISBN-10: 0-7852-2166-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-7852-2166-1 (hardcover)
1. Problem solving--Miscellanea. 2.Management--Miscellanea. I.
Title.
HD30.29.F713 2007
658.4'03--dc22

2006030532

.Printed in the United States of America
07 08 09 10 QW 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

Creativity is a lot more than artistic expression. Its a myth that to be creative you must be artistic. Everyone is creative whether he is artistically inclined or not. Creativity is about problem solving, decisionmaking, and self-expression. Its also the foundational thinking skill for innovation. If you use your thinking to create solutions for any challenge in your life, you are creative. Very few of us have trained our creative brain. Its a huge opportunity because even a little training in creative problem solving can lead to breakthrough results.

Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Steven Jobs, and Anita Roddick (founder of The Body Shop) are all creative because they create novel things that are useful in their domains. Where is creativity required in your domain? Are you selling a product to a hard-to-reach CEO, reinventing an old product line, or dealing with a teenager? You need creativity! The tougher the challenge, the more you need creative thinking to come up with innovative ideas.

When we meet challenges, our work and lives expand with possibility. When we fail to meet a challenge, its just the opposite; were frustrated. We all work hard at our challenges, but we rarely invoke our innate creativity. Instead we try to critique and analyze our way to a solution. Unfortunately, these important thinking skills dont lead us to invent something new. Whats needed is a better balance of imagination and analysis. With improved creative-thinking skills we can meet more of our challenges, solve more problems, and take advantage of opportunities by creating novelty thats useful. That is what this book is all about, more novelty thats useful by using our creativity.

With good ideas, you can create new products, new services, and possibly a newly energized life. Ideas are the most important asset any person or organization has. Its very straightforward: if you have more ideas, and better ideas, youll be more successfulhowever you define successat whatever your goals are. Of course, you have to take action on those ideas if you want to enjoy the fruits of your labors.

ITS A MYTH THAT TO BE CREATIVE YOU MUST
BE ARTISTIC. EVERYONE IS CREATIVE WHETHER
HE IS ARTISTICALLY INCLINED OR NOT.

So, Jacks Notebook is for anyone who wants more ideas. If you are struggling to move ahead in your career, if youre an executive with a thorny corporate challenge, someone trying to solve a messy community issue, a family trying to sort through an emotional conflict, or an entrepreneur looking for ways to make the most of limited resources this book is for you. If you have a mess on your hands, you have found a useful tool.

This business novel contains a simple method, a process really, for creative thinking that is powerfully effective in solving both business and personal challenges. The method is my own extension of something called CPS, which is short for creative problem solving. CPS was developed by advertising maven Alex Osborn, who coined the word brainstorming in his book Applied Imagination, and the scholar Sidney Parnes, PhD. It is, simply put, a process for becoming deliberately creativeyou apply your imagination to challenges in a thoughtful way. In fact, CPS asks you to consider how you think. How you think separates those who merely hope for creative ideas from those who actually generate them. When you begin making more deliberate and conscious choices about how you think, youll leverage your creative thinking in matters that are most important to you. And its not difficult.

Dont be intimidated by the words method and process. The basics of CPS are easy. In the simplest of terms, its about list making and choice making. If you are faced with a challenge, do this: first make a list of options or ideasand then make a choice. But remember to make your list without judgment. When you stop and critique an idea, you hinder the flow of the imagination. Instead, delay judging your ideas until after youve created a full list. This is the essence of the CPS process.