John Templeton Quotes

Never bring the problem solving stage into the decision making stage. Otherwise, you surrender yourself to the problem rather than the solution.

Always find different ways to accomplish the mission. Then run a counter-analysis and list the advantages and disadvantages. When you have done that, you are ready to make a decision.

Successful people engage that creative part of their minds and ask, "Well, I wonder how else I can look at this problem? I wonder how else I could deal with this decision? I wonder what other possibilities I have there?"

I am told by others that I have a lateral-thinking, broad approach to problems, sometimes to my detriment. In school, my grades always suffered because I was continually mucking about with irrelevant side issues, which I often found to be more interesting.

I like to have fulsome discussions on every topic. What happens if you lose this show? What would you do? We have to look at every hypothesis.

A lot of us saw Blackadder in terms of problem-solving - 'Did that work in that episode?' and so on. We were very picky.

I give people ideas on how to solve intractable problems.

You can't always come up with the optimal solution, but you can usually come up with a better solution.

Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli

The best place to solve a problem is on paper.

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem

Imagination doesn’t just mean making things up. It means thinking things through, solving them, or hoping to do so, and being just distant enough to be able to laugh at things that are normally painful. Head teachers would call this escapism, but they would be entirely wrong. I would call fantasy the most serious, and the most useful, branch of writing there is. And this is why I don’t, and never would, write Real Books.

When your back is against the wall financially, creative juices flow.

The way to get unstuck is to start down the wrong path, right now.

We can't avoid reasoning; we can only avoid doing it well.

The hero is the one with ideas.

Anyone who still wants to experience fairytales these days can’t afford to dither when it comes to using their brains.

You collect as much information as you can and then you put it into the mulberry of your mind and hope that you come up with a decent wine. Sometimes you do; sometimes you don't.

This is one of my favorites. People think of creativity as this sort of unbridled thing, but engineers thrive on constraints. They love to think their way out of that little box: 'We know you said it was impossible, but we're going to do this, this, and that to get us there.'

... it can often be profitable to try a technique on a problem even if you know in advance that it cannot possibly solve the problem completely.

To have a major breakthrough in policy, you have to be able to stop and think.

We have been sitting here all night bullshitting and we still don’t know what to do.

Problem solving, and I don't mean algebra, seems to be my life's work. Maybe it's everyone's life's work.

Complacency with our traditional judgement based thinking methods is not enough. Our existing thinking habits are excellent just as the rear wheel of a motor car is excellent but not enough. We need to put far more emphasis on creative and design thinking. Judgement and analysis are not enough.

Enterprise is first creativity. You need creativity to see what's out there and shape it to your advantage. You need creativity to look at the world a little differently. You need creativity to take a different approach, to be different.