My Thoughts

The Forensic Detective's Guide to Creative Problem Solving in Business

The bloke sitting across from me in the Adelaide pub was explaining how he'd cracked a fifteen-year-old cold case using nothing but Google Earth and his grandmother's recipe collection.

I'm not making this up.

Detective Senior Constable Mike Torres had been stuck on a missing person case that everyone else had written off. Standard police procedures had hit every dead end. But Mike, being a bit of a foodie himself, noticed something odd in the victim's final social media posts – she'd been experimenting with traditional Croatian recipes, specifically mentioning her hunt for "authentic Dalmatian ingredients" around Melbourne's western suburbs.

Long story short, by mapping Croatian delicatessens against mobile phone tower pings and cross-referencing with her grandmother's handwritten recipe notes (found in evidence), he located her within 48 hours. She'd been living quietly in Sunshine, having staged her own disappearance to escape an abusive relationship, but had been too afraid to contact family.

This, my friends, is what proper creative problem solving looks like in action.

Why Your Current Problem-Solving Approach Is Probably Broken

Most businesses approach problems like a mechanic fixing a car – methodical, sequential, following the manual. Nothing wrong with that for straightforward issues. But when you're dealing with complex business challenges, human behaviour, or market dynamics, the mechanical approach falls apart faster than a cheap umbrella in a Brisbane storm.

Here's what I've observed after seventeen years of consulting with everyone from mining companies to tech startups: 87% of businesses get stuck because they're asking the wrong questions, not because they lack answers.

Take customer retention problems. The typical approach? Survey customers who left, analyze feedback, implement changes. Logical, right? But I've seen companies spend months on this cycle, missing the obvious truth that their best customers aren't representative of their target market anymore. They're solving yesterday's problem with yesterday's data.

The detective approach flips this. Instead of asking "Why are customers leaving?", start with "What would make someone stay in a business they were planning to leave?" Different question, completely different investigation path.

The Three Pillars of Detective-Style Business Problem Solving

1. Pattern Recognition Over Linear Thinking

Traditional business problem solving follows A→B→C logic. Creative approaches look for patterns that connect A to M to C, bypassing the obvious middle steps entirely.

I learned this the hard way during my early consulting days in Perth. A manufacturing client was haemorrhaging money on quality control issues. The obvious solution involved hiring more inspectors, better training, upgraded equipment – standard stuff. We spent three months implementing changes and saw minimal improvement.

Then I noticed something during a site visit. The quality issues spiked predictably every fortnight, always on Thursdays. Not Mondays when people were tired from weekends, not Fridays when they were checked out. Thursdays.

Turns out the cleaning crew changed their schedule every two weeks, alternating between Tuesday and Wednesday nights. The Thursday morning shift inherited differently cleaned workstations, affecting the first batch of products. Simple pattern, obvious once you see it, completely invisible if you're focused on training and equipment.

The strategic thinking and analytical training programs I've seen lately are finally catching onto this pattern-recognition approach, though most still teach it backwards.

2. Lateral Information Gathering

Detectives don't just interview suspects – they talk to taxi drivers, shop owners, neighbours who might have seen something odd. Business problem solving needs the same broad-spectrum approach.

When Bunnings Warehouse expanded into the UK market and initially struggled, the post-mortem reports focused on market research and competitive analysis. Fair enough. But if you dig deeper, you'll find insights from unexpected sources – Australian expats in London who could have predicted the cultural mismatches, British tradespeople who understood the weekend DIY habits, even weather data that explained seasonal buying patterns.

The best solutions often come from adjacent industries. I've solved manufacturing problems using insights from restaurant kitchen operations, resolved team communication issues by studying orchestra rehearsal techniques, and improved customer service by analyzing emergency room triage protocols.

Your next breakthrough probably isn't hiding in your industry's best practices. It's lurking in a completely different field, waiting for someone curious enough to make the connection.

3. Hypothesis Testing with Creative Variables

Here's where most business problem solving gets boring. You form a hypothesis, test it systematically, measure results. Textbook stuff, but painfully slow and often misleading.

Creative problem solving treats hypotheses like crime scene theories – you don't just test whether they're right, you actively try to prove them wrong using unexpected variables.

Let's say you hypothesize that customer complaints increase because of staff training gaps. Standard testing involves measuring complaint rates before and after training interventions. Creative testing throws curveballs: what happens to complaints during school holidays when customer demographics shift? How do complaint patterns change during major sporting events when staff attention might be divided? Are complaints higher in stores with more natural light?

The teaming up with coworkers workshops I run often demonstrate this principle accidentally. Teams expecting to improve communication through structured exercises instead discover their real issues stem from office layout, shared lunch schedules, or even differences in coffee preferences affecting informal collaboration.

The Tools That Actually Work (And The Ones That Don't)

Mind mapping: Overrated. Useful for initial brainstorming but terrible for complex problem solving because it locks you into radial thinking patterns.

Root cause analysis: Good for technical problems, hopeless for human-centered issues. Root causes in business are usually systems problems disguised as people problems.

Design thinking: Brilliant when applied correctly, which happens about 23% of the time in my experience. Most companies skip the empathy phase and jump straight to ideation, defeating the entire purpose.

The "Five Whys" technique: Fantastic for getting to core issues, but only if you're prepared for uncomfortable answers. Most businesses stop asking why when they reach blame territory.

What actually works? Perspective shifting exercises. Role-playing your problem from different viewpoints – customer, competitor, supplier, regulator, journalist writing an exposé. Each perspective reveals different solution paths.

Real-World Application: The Darwin Software Company Story

Had a client in Darwin – small software company developing apps for tourism operators. Their big problem: user engagement dropped dramatically after the first week. Classic onboarding issue, right?

Standard approach would involve user experience research, onboarding flow analysis, feature usage tracking. All important stuff. But I started with a weird question: "If this app was a person at a party, what would it be doing wrong?"

Sounds ridiculous, but it opened up conversations about personality, social dynamics, and user relationships with technology. We discovered the app was being "clingy" – sending too many notifications, asking for feedback too early, trying too hard to be helpful.

The real insight came from mapping user behaviour against Darwin's tourism seasons. Engagement drops coincided with the end of dry season tourism, when operators were either busy with peak season demands or shifting focus to wet season preparations. The app wasn't failing – it was offering solutions users needed at different times.

Solution? Seasonal mode switching that completely changed the app's personality and feature prominence based on tourism calendars. Engagement improved by 340% and user retention jumped to 89%.

Traditional UX research would never have uncovered this because it focuses on individual user behaviour, not cyclical industry patterns.

Where Creative Problem Solving Goes Wrong

The biggest trap is treating creativity as the opposite of structure. You need both. Creative approaches without rigorous testing produce beautiful failures. Structured approaches without creative thinking produce predictable mediocrity.

I've seen teams spend weeks on elaborate brainstorming sessions, generating hundreds of "innovative" ideas that all solve the wrong problem. Creativity without focus is just expensive procrastination.

Another common mistake: assuming creative solutions must be complex. Some of the best problem solving I've witnessed involved stupidly simple changes that nobody had thought to try. Moving a single button on a website. Changing meeting times by thirty minutes. Offering customers a different sequence of choices.

The detective who solved that missing person case using Croatian recipes? His insight wasn't complicated. He just connected information differently than everyone else had tried.

Implementation That Doesn't Suck

Creative problem solving fails during implementation more often than during ideation. Brilliant insights get watered down by committee, twisted by stakeholder concerns, or killed by "that's not how we do things here" thinking.

The key is treating implementation as part of the creative process, not a separate administrative phase. Your solution should be evolving and adapting based on real-world feedback, not just being rolled out according to plan.

Start small, test weird, scale smart. If your creative solution can't survive contact with reality in a limited trial, it definitely won't survive company-wide implementation.

And for crying out loud, measure the right things. Don't just track whether your solution works – track whether it's solving the actual problem you identified, whether it's creating new problems you didn't anticipate, and whether it's sustainable with your current resources and culture.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Business Creativity

Most businesses say they want creative problem solving but actually want safe innovation – solutions that feel different enough to be exciting but similar enough to be comfortable.

Real creative problem solving often produces answers that make people uncomfortable. It challenges assumptions, reveals inconvenient truths, and sometimes suggests that the problem you thought you had isn't actually the problem you need to solve.

If your problem-solving approach never makes anyone squirm, you're probably not being creative enough.

The best business problem solvers I know are comfortable with ambiguity, curious about failure, and obsessed with understanding rather than being understood. They ask questions that make people think twice, challenge solutions that seem too obvious, and occasionally suggest approaches that sound completely mad until you try them.

That detective in Adelaide didn't solve a cold case by following standard procedures. He solved it by being willing to explore connections that other people dismissed as irrelevant.

Your next business breakthrough is probably hiding in similarly "irrelevant" connections, waiting for someone curious enough to investigate.

More Resources: Skill Matrix Blog | Learning Wave Contact