People Fail to Think of New Ideas Because They Are Mentally Reactive Rather Than Active

People fail to think of new ideas because they are mentally reactive rather than active. (11) Each person faces their own challenges in life. These challenges can range from easy to difficult. Regardless of the range of difficulty, one must think dynamically to develop solutions to these challenges. As we try to solve the problems of our lives, each idea must be taken into consideration. Ideas that come from experience or searching for new ideas can help in the decision making process. This paper will discuss and solve a problem that I had experienced in my early 20s. "Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." As said by Ralph Waldo Emerson. This had been one the most challenging situation I had encountered. Using the four steps of the creative process, I will explain how the issue came about, How the problem was expressed, Investigating the issue, and how we produced ideas to remedy the issue.

At my previous job, I was a plant operator for a pelletizer conversion facility. It was the only company to use this process in Hawaii. This facility would take processed raw sludge and convert into grade A fertilizer. The facility was in its first year of operation so it was filled with many issues with getting everything running smooth. As one of the senior operators, I was in charge of the data management system for the dryer system. This system was a key part of the entire process. It would use a mix of methane fuel and diesel to heat the air in the system to 900* degrees. During a weekend while there are only two operators on shift, we were faced with an issue that neither of us could figure out. This issue would shut the entire plant down until it was fixed and as the senior operator, I would be held responsible for the care of the facility.

I notified my team member that the dryer system had a catastrophic shutdown and so the entire facility had to go into an emergency shutdown. Once the shutdown was complete, we were able to think clearly as the alarms went quite. I notified the plant manager and operations manager of the issue over the phone. As they are not trained in the technical side of the facility, they were unable to help with the situation. It was up my partner and I to remedy this situation. The facility is dependent on the city sludge process, so the City & County needed to be notified as well. We had started the troubleshooting process to see where we could get started. Once the City & County was notified we were then able to go over plans on how we would find and solve this issue.

The company would lose thousands of dollars as each hour the facility was down. This added pressure to the already stressful situation. We had few options that would come to mind before deeply thinking of what we need to do. My teammate and I had reviewed the technical manuals for the dryer system and followed the troubleshooting techniques with no avail. Some of the ideas we had were checking went from easy like broken fuses and broken grounds. The out of the box thoughts we had were broken valves in the system or delete memory files from the electronic process. If it were a broken valve, it would have taken days to have it replaced. Luckily, after the third hour we were able to identify components that could have been giving us the shutdown. We had gotten to this point by logically going through each station that could affect the system. As we went through each component, we went through as testing process to figure out if it was the root cause or not. We had started with the small, easy items to replace items, and working our way up to the difficult components.