Case Study: Stimulating creative thinking and innovative work practices
Aside from motivating people in an innovative project, as the leader of an innovation team, you will take on a coaching and mentoring role. An important part of your mentoring role will be to teach members of the team how to be effective creative thinkers and developers of innovative work practices.
There are many approaches to creative thinking. Carol wants you to investigate these and to decide on an approach you would like to trial with your team.
Carol has requested that you draft a plan for teaching a creative thinking process, one that is credible. Choose one you'd like to apply and explain to Carol the tools you would like to use for each step of the process.
For example, Csikzentmihalyi's Flow Theory has 5 stages of creative thinking in the process and a tool that could be used inside of this could be the Six Thinking Hats at the Evaluation stage.
Have a clear understanding of why you think the process and tools you've chosen might be effective at nurturing and teaching creative thinking.
If Carol approves your plan, she will endorse this approach as part of the professional development program for all staff participating in your innovative project. If it proves to be effective, it will be operationalised business wide to nurture creative thinking in the service. Carol is looking forward to talking with regulated assessors at future site assessment and rating visits about how the service is demonstrating innovation and supporting creative thinking.
Select an effective process of creative thinking and explain how this process could be applied and used to develop innovative work practices with a team. (bullet points allowed) In your response, include the following:
- the order of steps/stages of your chosen model with an explanation of what happens at each step/stage
- tools that you would like to use at each step of the process and how you would instruct team members to engage with them
- reason/s why you chose this particular model/approach to teach creative thinking to develop innovative work practice at Little Catalysts ELC.
Benchmark Criteria
Demonstrated knowledge of creative thinking and innovative work practices.