“If you want newness, you have to have strangeness.”

“If you don’t have wild ideas, you’re not going to find creative ideas.”

“A wish is the first step to a question.”

“Creativity is the raw material for innovation.”

If you think back over the last 20 or 30 years, we’ve seen innovative products introduced that make our lives easier or more convenient. Personal computers, smart phones, robot vacuum cleaners and many more products have become a part of our lives. But before they became indispensable to us, these products were ideas in someone’s head.

In October, the IPS Leadership Team was fortunate enough to attend a professional development course at Harvard University. The title of the course was Leading with Agility and Creativity and the quotes above are four that stuck with me from this three-day training. Agility is not the first word that comes to mind when you think of the behemoth that is UT; but even though we are a huge part of UT’s outreach mission, we are still small enough that we can be creative and agile to help us serve our customers better.

One of the models we discussed during the training was GPS™ Thinking. In this instance, GPS is an acronym for Great Problem Solving, which is a model designed to lead you from a great idea to a solution. When you have an idea, you first examine if it is a good one (G), is it useful and is it valuable. Then you pose questions to identify problems (P) with the idea. The questions should start with How to…? How might we…? Or what are all the ways we might…? You then generate solutions (S) for the identified problems.  

Imagine a meeting room of a product development company and a developer comes up with an idea for a robotic vacuum. Others in the room start discussing what is good about the idea. They might say: “it would be a useful product,” or “this would save us time with vacuuming the house, so we can spend more time with our kids on weekends.” Then they identify potential problems: “how might we keep the vacuum from running into furniture,” “what are all the ways we might get consumers interested in switching from their traditional vacuums?” And with the GPS Thinking model, you follow with generating solutions. In the case of iRobot’s Roomba, they developed light touch technology that causes the machine to slow down and gently touch the obstacle with its bumper before changing directions (support.irobot.ca, 2025, Dec. 3).

Now, imagine a meeting room with your agency’s leadership team. Take time to generate some wild ideas, then run some of those ideas through the GPS Thinking model. You might be surprised by the creativity and innovation that emerge!