Creative Problem Solving is a Skill Companies Need Most

There were more than a few strange looks when we were sharing the original vision for the ICC well over a decade ago, but it seems that the market has come to the ICC. In a recent article published by LinkedIn, the number one soft skill that employers are looking for is "creative problem solving."

Emerging from the recession it seemed that the last thing companies were thinking about was creativity and innovation, but as it turned out, the companies that are now controlling the market did just that, realizing that if we are to avoid those kinds of downturns in the future, and to grow will take new thinking.

Designers have been following a "process" of discovery for as long as there has been design, but in the last decade the business schools have begun to embrace the fact that the world has changed so comprehensively that established case studies were expiring faster than new stories were being captured.

Now human-centered design is the only method that works because all of our customers are over-empowered. The creative problem solver has to anticipate what the customer needs before the customer even knows that they need it. In a classic example, AT&T was slow to jump into the cell phone movement because their surveys indicated that consumers didn't want to be reachable at all times and felt that there were more than enough pay phones on every corner.

But entrepreneurial carriers saw phones as devices that could do far more than what AT&T was asking about. AT&T eventually joined the market as the exclusive carrier for Apple's new iPhone, but nearly 10 years after their competition had been prospering from mobile phone contracts.

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Reference Article: https://learning.linkedin.com/blog/top-skills/the-skills-companies-need-most-in-2019--and-how-to-learn-them