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How will your company get the right people with the right talent together to solve the right problems and produce innovative solutions? This workshop offers a fresh, inspirational approach to innovation and problem-solving leadership. It will help your organization gain valuable knowledge about how people think and solve problems, how to build an innovation competence and how to create a culture of creativity. Our approach is directly concerned with the diversity with which people solve problems, generate ideas and solutions, and relate to and influence others. It’s about a person’s preference for thinking style and how they use that to solve problems. No style is basically good or bad, but is more or less useful in a particular circumstance. At the heart of innovation is problem-solving. It is the essence of innovation! We’ve found that the secret to how people solve problems is in how they approach “structure.” That is, how they deal with rules, principles, boundaries, policies, procedures, etc. We’re able to assess preferences for structure in order to understand their strengths and weaknesses. As a leader, how will you help find more competent innovators – people who can become more innovative and creative problem-solvers? For today’s leader, the management of innovation, change and diversity ranks at the top of the “most challenging” list. Finding Innovators is a workshop about creativity and problem-solving. It’s about leveraging the collective abilities and know-how of the organization and its people in order to achieve superior performance. It applies a unique approach to understanding people’s problem-solving strategies and how these can be used to select naturally creative people and build a culture of innovation.
Over 60 years ago, W. Edwards Deming started a revolution with four little words: "quality starts with me!" He might as well have said “innovation starts with me!” Competitive success in today’s world depends on an organization’s ability to be innovative. Being innovative demands that organizations successfully solve problems. Problem solving is a uniquely human ability and we believe that every human being is creative and solves problems. Thus, innovation starts with the individual – the creative, problem solving individual. The question is, how can we improve our organization’s ability to find people who are creative and innovative problem solvers? How can we find the right people, with the right talents, to help solve the right problems? How would you like to be able to find, identify, and select innovative people and then coach them on innovative problem solving skills? How would you like to develop a library of those people and their skills and use these to select teams to solve important business problems? Think about this…. What kinds of measures are you currently using to assess employees or the organization on innovation, creativity, decision-making, or problem-solving skills? What methods are you currently using to select people when you want to put together a problem-solving team? What methods are you currently using to capture and store data that helps you find problem solvers in an information system such as a knowledge management system, competency profile, succession management or the like? If you’re interested in something that would help you identify and select people who are exceptional problem-solvers, then read on. Our approach has been around for more than 30 years but used mainly with companies like Proctor & Gamble, Dow Chemical, and the USAF. Plus, it’s taught in a number of MBA programs around the country at schools like Penn State, the University of North Carolina, the University of Florida and the University of Indiana. This approach has been used to enhance quality improvement efforts, organizational change processes, and to help people become more aware of their own strategy for solving problems. It’s also used extensively to help increase creativity and build collaborative solutions to organizational problems and promote a more innovative culture. The concept is simple – it has to do with how people think. More specifically, how people think about solving problems. What we call thinking style. By ‘thinking style’, we mean the ‘strategy’ a person uses to solve problems. In other words, ‘how’ they think about solving problems. Most people have never really tried to analyze ‘how’ they think. In fact, most organizations usually select people to work on problems because of their experience, whether it’s technical, organizational, functional, or even creative. It’s what we would call their capacity for thinking or “level of thinking”. By level, again I mean the skills, experience, and natural ability people bring with them. We believe that all people are creative. So we just try to help them understand that this is really a strength, both in themselves as well as others and, by knowing more about how they AND their team mates think, they can be more creative in solving problems. This, in turn, will help the organization generate more business building ideas and help foster a climate for innovation. But style or strategy looks at how people act to solve problems while working within structures. In other words, every problem solving situation, regardless of what the problem is, there are some boundaries or rules. Those boundaries could be resources – time, schedule, money, people, ideas – or rules imposed by the organization, the nature of the profession, the government or something else. Structure is important because it means that some people do best at solving problems when they work within some boundaries, some set of rules. In other words, they prefer to work ‘within the box’ – or, within the boundaries of the problem solving situation. On the other hand, some people are best at solving problems when they can work outside those boundaries or rules – that is, ‘outside the box’. We believe that problem-solving is at the heart of competition. Furthermore, we believe that all people solve problems and are creative. So we help organizations become more competitive by helping them identify and use their intellectual capital – people intelligence - in ways that enhance their value creation process. I don’t know how your organization views innovation but we think it’s still one of those kind of fuzzy things that people are not quite sure how to define or how to approach. But, regardless of how it’s viewed, it still involves people, how they think, how they solve problems, and whether or not they are seen as creative. The foundation for our work suggests that, ‘though all people solve problems and all people are creative, the difference is in how they ‘think’ about solving problems – that is, their ‘strategy for solving problems’. We’ve found that the secret to understanding their strategy is in knowing how people work with structure – that is, how they work with rules, principles, policies, procedures, guidelines, etc. Some people prefer to solve problems with more structure – we call these people ‘adaptors.’ Adaptors are always looking for ways to make things ‘better.’ They like to work ‘within the box.’ This tends to go against a lot of the literature on creativity – which seems to think that, if you provide less structure, people will be more creative. This works for some people, but not most. The fact is, most adaptors are very creative when given a set of boundaries and rules to work with. Some good public examples of this might be the TV program, Trading Spaces – where people need to be inventive and creative, given a very strict budget. Another example, though more dramatic, would be the Apollo 13 incident, where highly creative people had to work within very strict rules and boundaries governing spacecraft design and space flight. Yet, in both cases, people were able to demonstrate high levels of ingenuity, inventiveness and creativity given strict boundaries and within a particular structure. On the other hand, some people need less structure – we call these people ‘innovators.’ Innovators look for ways to make things ‘different.’ They tend to work ‘outside the box.’ In other words, take away some of the structure and they are very creative. These are people who are usually referred to as "blue sky" thinkers. They don't like structure and they want to make things "different." What we help you do is to assess peoples’ ‘thinking’ preferences in a way that places them on a continuum - from more adaptive to more innovative – that is, from needing more structure to needing less structure. This can be a very powerful combination. Because now we can help people better understand their own strengths and style preferences, as well as that of their team mates. When you do this it permits you to structure a problem in such a way that you can take advantage of the style, skills, and experience of the team. OR, you can structure a team, based on the combination of style and level to tackle certain kinds of problems, and coach people to better understand how to take advantage of their own styles, as well as their team mates, in order to solve problems. We believe the combination of understanding their strategy of tackling problems accompanied by their skill or experience in problem solving techniques greatly enhances their opportunities for solving real business problems and producing more effective solutions to business problems. We offer numerous ways for you to discover how best to identify, find, select, and make use of the innovative and creative talents of your people… First, we offer either a 1/2–day or a full-day orientation workshop on assessing and applying the approach. What we call an “add-on.” This can be a part of your regular leadership, supervisory, or team development curriculum. Further, it can be tailored to the specific needs of your organization. In this workshop, participants will discover…
Second, we can offer either a 1-day, 2-day, or 3-day stand-alone workshop that deals not only with assessing and understanding thinking styles and their uses but also deals with creativity and how to help build a culture of innovation and creativity throughout the organization.
You will learn how to structure a problem solving situation to take advantage of the styles available to help solve the business problem. In the expert courses we will deal in greater detail with…
Third, and very important is, once you discover the value of thinking style to your particular problem solving needs, you can begin to build a data base of your employee population. That way, when it comes time to assemble teams, you will have access to profiles that match the structure required for solving the particular problem that the team needs to address. Companies that have used our approach have discovered…
We also know that companies like Proctor & Gamble and the United States Air Force, who have used this process effectively, have realized as much as 10-20% increase in ‘fuzzy front end’ ideas and a 20-25% increase in back-end commercialization of ideas. This approach is…
It is an effective way of building and enhancing individual and team leadership skills that address these issues. And it will help your teams gain valuable knowledge about how people think and relate to others, how to communicate more effectively, improve participation, respect team diversity and focus on the problem to be solved rather than how to manage each other. This approach is being used world-wide to help teams better understand how to become more creative, effective problem-solvers. It is based on over 30 years of research and measures cognitive or thinking style. It is used extensively in the USA, the United Kingdom and in other countries throughout Europe and Asia for managing change, leading diversity, quality management, strategic planning, building new structures, and renewing policies, practices, and procedures. It’s used by CEO’s, military leaders, quality executives, HR executives and specialists, university faculty, teachers, and consultants to increase group cohesion and effectiveness; to sharpen problem-solving and team building skills and many other uses. This approach involves understanding and appreciating the diversity of individual styles of problem-solving. These style differences lie on a normally distributed continuum and range from high adaption to high innovation. These differences in style produce distinctive patterns of behavior. The key to the distinction is that the more adaptive prefer their problems to be associated with more structure, with more of this structure consensually agreed, than do the more innovative. In short, adaptors tend to produce solutions that make things “better.” The more innovative prefer solving problems with less structure and are less concerned that the structure be consensually agreed than are those more adaptive. In short, they tend to produce solutions that make things “different.” A diversity of problems requires a diverse team—Some problem-solvers are difficult to manage because each individual’s preference can also be seen to have disadvantages, especially by people not like them. The value of our approach is to appreciate the value of diversity in problem-solving and change. To use this information to help make better use of one’s self and other people for mutual benefit, in every group of which you are a member. Benefits to Your Company
What will you learn about innovation and problem-solving? In this workshop you will…
Thinking Style is a novel approach to understanding cognitive or thinking style and how it’s used in problem-solving, creativity, and decision-making. You will develop a new perspective on innovation and problem-solving. You can then craft a problem or a team to enable them to take advantage of their strategic style in order to solve important business problems.
Who Should Attend
For more information e-mail info@bianetics.com or call us at 1-210-408-2885 or 1-866-225-6201
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