About Think Jar Collective
We’re about helping people, organizations and systems to problem solve better.
Think Jar Collective started in 2010 and has remained as a repository of tools, insights, interviews and expert consulting to help people and organizations to problem solve better. It's a decent place to go for methods, tips, training, and inspiration around helping people and organizations learn how to foster disciplined innovation. We aim to demystify what creativity is and share the best articles, tips and techniques you can use to tackle complexity and innovate.
Think Jar Collective contributors share articles and tools, while the innovation consultancy arm of Think Jar Collective is stewarded by Ben Weinlick.
Why Creative Problem Solving?
As complexity increases in our world, creative problem solving is more essential than ever. It’s not a thing that only artists do, it’s about any human being and system getting better at exploring root causes of challenges and designing possible solutions based on deeper insights and creative perspectives.
Creativity is quickly becoming one of the most important competencies that people and organizations need to cultivate in order to stay relevant in our fast paced times.
“According to a study by IBM and based on 1,500 corporate heads and public sector leaders across 60 nations and 33 industries, creativity is now the most important leadership quality for success in business, outweighing even integrity and global thinking.”
For individuals
If you want to hone your problem solving abilities take some time to read the articles, look at the projects, watch the videos, link possible ideas together, shake up assumptions and your next great idea to put into action might arise.
For organizations
If you want to increase disciplined innovation and problem solving in your organization, contact us, we have experts that can help.
For systems and wicked complex challenges
With tackling wicked complex challenges today, solving within one organization is rarely enough. One individual or organization alone is not going to solve housing, health, social, or other entangled system challenges. Many stakeholder perspectives of a system are needed. People with lived experience of a challenge need to be centered, as well as many other perspectives who hold relationships in complex systems. It’s not easy stewarding creative problem solving to help with these types of wicked challenges. A selection of Think Jar Collective members have over 20 years experience leading, teaching and facilitating this type of complex collective problem solving. Contact us if you’d like help exploring what it takes to steward a systems change lab.
Authors & Article Contributors
All the Think Jar Collective article contributors are deeply involved with fostering new thinking in the various domains they work in. Some of us are leading innovative projects in the social sector, some are breaking new ground in the design world and others are educators, business leaders, musicians, artificial intelligence researchers, journalists and entrepreneurs. All of us recognize the importance of getting ideas and insights from others that work outside our respective fields. Intersecting diverse fields and ideas is the heart of fostering creativity and innovation.
Our Name
Think Jar is a play on words, where we see this initiative as both a jar of creative ideas to draw from and we hope the content 'jars' assumptions and opens up new thinking. The name arose after a creative collision between Think Jar explorers Ben Weinlick and Debbie Reid.
Debbie reflected one day:
“I think what helps me keep creative is seeking out interactions with passionate, creative people. It’s hard to put into words what happens, but kinda like, weird, humorous, spontaneous interactions can “JAR” me out of habitual patterns of thinking.”
Bash Ideas Together With Us
If you have a relevant idea, article, project, contact us!