Book excerpt: While the skills to identify and solve problems are becoming recognised as being increasingly important, there are not many good ways to help you acquire those skills. This book is designed to help you help you acquire those skills so as to be able to deal with undesirable situations, identify the right problem and provide the optimal acceptable solution from the range of prospective solutions.The needed skill for providing acceptable solutions is the ability to think differently to that of your contemporaries. You need to go beyond systems thinking and apply holistic thinking to the matter at hand. This book helps you develop that skill, building on the works of W. Edwards Deming (Quality), Peter Senge (systems thinking), Tom Peters, Peter Drucker and Michael Hammer and James Champy (management) to tell you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and provide you with the understanding of why it must be done. While systems thinking can help you to understand relationships in situations and think systemically and systematically, systems thinking alone cannot help you provide innovative solutions to complex problems. This is because understanding situations is only the first step on the journey that provides those innovative solutions. This book provides you with frameworks and classifications systemically and systematically starting by discussing thinking, then taking you through thinking about undesirable situations and problems and how to convert them to acceptable solutions.The book is split into three parts: * Part I. Thinking and ideas.* Part II. Using the ideas in problem-solving.* Part III. Innovative solutions to complex problems.Part I provides the thinking and communications tools which are used to create and communicate innovative solutions to complex problems. Chapter 2 introduces you to thinking and introduces some of the tools you can use to assist your creative thinking. Chapter 3 discusses ways to communicate ideas because there is little point in generating ideas if you are not going to do anything with them. Chapter 4 introduces nine Holistic Thinking Perspectives (HTP) as anchor points on the perspectives perimeter and more.Chapter 5: Introduces and provides an overview of critical thinking. Part II covers the problem-solving aspect of creating innovative solutions to complex problems. Chapter 6 introduces Active Brainstorming as a way to increase the numbers of ideas generated by brainstorming using the HTPs coupled with the Kipling questions "who, what, where, when, why and how". Chapter 7 discusses the nature of systems and complex systems.Chapter 8 discusses decision-making because decision-making is at the heart of problem-solving. Chapter 9 discusses problems and solutions, the assumptions behind problem-solving, ways to remedy problems and introduces a holistic approach to managing problems and solutions. Part III provides examples of innovative solutions to complex problems showing how the progressive perspectives went beyond systems thinking and contributed to the innovative solutions and concludes by suggesting things you can do to start to become an innovator.Chapter 10 provides a range of examples of holistic thinking. Each example not only illustrates how the problem-solving process was tailored but provides examples of other aspects of finding innovative solutions to complex problems such as where things went correctly and where and how things can and did go wrong.Chapter 11 provides macro and micro examples of perceiving several issues/systems from various points on the perspectives perimeter for different purposes, the insights obtained and the resulting innovative solutions. Chapter 12 provides suggestions for how you can go about creating your own innovative solutions to complex problems.This book also provides a definitive answer to the question, "what came first, the chicken or the egg?"