Creativity at Work

By Enrico Mastronardi

Something that I have really enjoyed so far this semester was the chair
presentation. One of the reasons I enjoyed it so much was because the
critical thinking and problem-solving skills I had to use while doing it. When I
first read the project last week, I thought it was going to be a simple
assignment that I would be able to complete in an hour or so. However, when
I re-checked the assignment the day before the due date, I realized that this
was not going to be the case. When I saw all of the restrictions and other
rules, I started getting worried that I would not have anything in my room
that could work as a chair. This caused me to walk around my room multiple
times and write a checklist of what I did have and what I didn’t have. I made
two columns of items that were not restricted and things that were
restricted. When I realized that this did not make things much easier for me,
I started looking for large objects that were not restricted. That led me to
find the shopping cart by my front door. I didn’t know at the time what it
would be used for, however, I wanted to incorporate it any way I could as I
believed no one else would have that idea. Afterward, I began searching my
room for other Items to use. I was pretty stuck until I came across my empty
backpack. I realized that none of my roommates have in person classes and
that we all played baseball so we had backpacks for that as well. I decided to
stack up 8 backpacks to make the chair. Although I could have been done
there, I still wanted to get the cart incorporated into my chair. I decided to
flip the cart over and use the front of it as a back rest. Although it seemed
like a simple solution for a chair, it caused me to really use my critical
thinking and problem-solving skills in order to complete this assignment.
​
One thing that really caught my attention over the last week during
this course was learning about the CPS Model and all the stages of it. I had
never thought of there being 6 stages of problem solving but after we looked
at the graph it made a lot more sense to me. What surprised me the most
was that I use most of these different stages of finding when I am lost and
need a direction to get back on track. Without even realizing, I used this CPS
model when completing our Chair assignment. Although I skipped a step or
two along the way, it’s crazy to think that without even knowing I was using
a model that advertisers and other critical thinkers use when they are lost
and need some help. A time recently when I unwarily used the CPS model
was with my job with Head and Shoulders. For my job, I am supposed to go
to high schools surrounding Columbia and give the football athletes benefits
of Head and Shoulders and giving them free samples to use. When I was
diagnosed with covid about a month ago, I was beginning to stress as I could
not deliver any samples to schools for two weeks and my position is only
until the end of September. In order to get through it, I went on google maps
and highlighted the rest of the schools I have to visit over the next two
weeks. I then began emailing 5 a day that were in the same area and telling
them I would be coming to the school to drop off the supplies tomorrow. That
was about half of the job I needed to complete as the other half consisted of
me figuring out a way to present the benefits to the athletes. I ended up
creating a video that highlights the benefits and sent it to the school AD and
asked them to share it with the athletes at his earliest convenience. While it
is not exactly the way I wanted to complete the tasks, I had to get creative in
order to finish the task.