Speaker 1: The original creative problem-solving process as developed by Alex Osborn in the 1940s has seen its various stages of iterations till now. One of its recent form is the Thinking Skills Model introduced by Professor Gerard Puccio, Chair for the Department of Creativity and Change Leadership at SUNY Buffalo State. This model for applying deliberate creative problem-solving is not only limited to a classroom or a boardroom. This is a way of living a creative lifestyle, a way to include the practice of creativity in our everyday lives. Now what does it mean to make creative problem-solving part of your life? Creativity is not only limited to the artistic domains. Creativity is how we do what we do in our lives. Creativity is how we deal with challenges that we face daily. Creativity is how we perceive and see certain things and use that perspective in creating something novel and useful. This is where the Thinking Skills Model plays a huge role to bridge the gap between our thoughts and our actions. For the most part, creativity is shown in what we do and how we do it. However, the first step is always the thought process involved before putting in the actions. If we begin thinking creatively, it will become evident in the ideas and solutions we generate to solve our everyday challenges. To solve any challenge, the Thinking Skills Model has developed three stages in the process. Clarification, Transformation, and Implementation. The stages are further divided into exploring the vision and formulating challenges as part of clarification, exploring ideas and formulating solutions as part of transformation, and finally exploring acceptance and formulating a plan as part of implementation. The key thing to understand as part of all these steps is to channel our thought process appropriately to apply creativity in what we do. For instance, in a situation where I am unsure what the actual problem is that I am trying to solve, I am in a clarification stage and need to adopt a divergent thinking mode to generate various problem statements or creative questions to help me clarify the problem at hand. Once I have figured out the problem and also generated a bunch of ideas for how to solve it, I need to switch gears and start thinking convergently while formulating solutions and pick the one to start implementing. The Thinking Skills Model is not just another process to learn, but we need to use it to help develop a mindset of creative problem solving. We face challenges every single day, whether it be work-related or in our everyday lives. Adopting a creative mindset helps us to see things differently, enables us to come up with unique ideas to solve our problems, and helps us to make creativity a part of our daily lives.