Jack’s Notebook author Gregg Fraley is the type of person who would ask a Starbucks barista – one he didn’t know – “What is your dream?” When he started researching Jack’s Notebook, he did just that. And, he said in a recent interview, “Not a single person said ‘Oh, I really want to be a waiter’ – they’d say ‘I’d like to start a business,’ or ‘I’d like to be involved in this industry.’

Jack’s Notebook, according to Fraley, is intended for people like that Starbucks barista – people who are starting a business or are new to business world. But that’s not to say it doesn’t have business relevance – Jack’s Notebook would resonate with anyone who needs to deal with change in their lives or their business (which is to say pretty much anyone). Fraley’s examples: Anybody who’s thinking about a career change; anybody who wants to do a better job of problem solving in their business.

Jack’s Notebook is a novel, a business fable inspired formatically by the works of Patrick Lenicioni and Eliyahu Goldratt. Said Fraley, “Narrative brings an emotional component, and when there’s an emotional component, people learn better. Stories are a very human way to learn. People see themselves in the characters…they think, oh, it could happen to me – or thank God that hasn’t happened to me!”

Jack’s Notebook is an elegant balance of imagination and analysis. The imagination reaches out and takes hold of the reader, while the accompanying analysis, which could bog down the story, instead feeds the reader’s curiosity about what the power that this CPS creative problem solving process seems to have. The analysis also could be somewhat comforting for readers who are more likely to be analytical than imaginative.

“It’s the natural tendency of people who are raised in the ‘one right answer’ to focus on analysis,” said Fraley. “We are not trained to be more imaginative. We don’t practice it. We might do art every other Friday if it’s raining – arts and music are all being left behind in favor of other things.

“But you need both imagination and analysis. Business people end up in those jobs because they are great at analysis. But, it’s like Dr. Spock and Captain Kirk – it wasn’t Spock who was the genius with great ideas, it was usually Kirk. You can’t analyze your way to a great idea – you can only see the path in retrospect. I would hope people would spend time developing their imaginative side to complement their analytical side.”

Jack’s Notebook is notable also for presenting the CPS process in a concrete and easy-to-grasp way. A meta-model for thinking and problem-solving that’s been around for about 50 years, CPS has always been considered something that you don’t pick up immediately. It’s complex and requires practice and the very melding of imagination and analytics that Fraley talks about. While there are many consultants offering CPS training and variations thereof, CPS training is most commonly taught at the CPSI conferences put on by the Creative Education Foundation. There, the basic “Springboard” training is usually at least three days long. (Disclaimer: I went through Springboard training at CPSI four years ago, and my company offers a training workshop based on a variation of CPS.)

Fraley, who has led Springboard training at CPSI for many years (though he was not my class leader), sees Jack’s Notebook as similar to Springboard because the characters in Jack’s Notebook go over and through the CPS process many times in solving problems that are critical to their lives. This is much the way Springboard works – small groups go over and over CPS in many iterations solving real-world problems that come out of the group. “Springboard is effective because it’s an emotional experience,” said Fraley.

Some reviewers have commented that in Jack’s Notebook, Fraley deviates from CPS for the sake of the more fast-moving narrative in the last third or so of the book. Not so, says he – the specific CPS model that he relies on is a fairly recent one modeled by Gerard Puccio of the International Center for Studies in Creativity at SUNY Buffalo State. “In Creative Leadership, Puccio classifies the steps in the CPS process in a slightly different way,” said Fraley. “He adds a diagnostic step.”

This diagnostic step involves determining exactly which part of the CPS process (Identifying the Challenge, Idea Generation, or Solution Development) you need to be in to handle the specific problem you are dealing with. Fraley’s version of the diagnostic step is what he calls in Jack’s Notebook a “Challenge Triage.” As the plot progresses and Jack becomes more fluent in CPS, he shows a corresponding fluidity with the Challenge Triage (which, like all the CPS principles Jack learns to use, is fully explained in the CPS Quick Reference Guide at the end of the book).

Fraley said he hopes that Jack’s Notebook will “take CPS to a whole new group of people. If you are a product manager, you’ve heard about this, these methods are not unheard of. The barista at Starbucks hasn’t heard of it. They don’t know that they need a better creative process – they only know that they’re stuck behind the bar....I was awestruck by how powerful CPS could be, but I was already 37 when I found out about it. Wouldn’t it be great to know a method for deliberate creativity when you’re young?”