The Unsticker - Alternate

You can use The Unsticker by yourself, or you can use it to ask questions to a friend or colleague as part of a creative problem solving session or a coaching session.

To use The Unsticker, just think of a problem that you're really stuck on and then ask yourself the question displayed on the screen. When you have an answer, tap 'Unstick!' and ask the next question. Keep going until either the problem changes or you can't even remember what had been troubling you, which users report happens after just 4 or 5 questions.

It's very important that you ask each question as it is displayed. If you skip over questions, looking for a 'good' one, then that's a sign that you're fitting the questions to the problem, in which case you'll never solve it. The best questions are the ones that make the least sense because you have to change your perspective on the problem in order to answer the question.

The Unsticker is a creative problem solver, so it helps you to generate ideas and solutions which are free from the 'blinkered' thinking that creates a problem in the first place. It can help you to solve practical problems, where constrained thinking gets in the way, but what it's really good for is finding new ways forwards by changing the way that you think.

There are two parts to a problem; logical and emotional. Actually, the logical part is never a problem. We can put man on the moon, so we can really solve any practical problem. But our minds make a problem difficult to solve; we don't want to lose something, or we don't want to hurt someone's feelings, or we don't want to compromise, or we don't want life to change, and so on.

The Unsticker works by getting you to think differently about your problem. The questions are random, and they are designed to change your thinking in different ways. To understand the question, you have to change how you think of a problem, which changes the emotional part, which frees you to solve the problem by seeing new possibilities and letting go of the constraints which created the problem in the first place.

"Highly recommended * * * * * * " Andy Bradbury