Creative Thinking and Problem Solving
Your ability to think strategically, creatively and intentionally both individually and within teams will be fundamental to your success as a line manager. From defining problems to prototyping solutions, continually expanding your repertoire of tools and techniques for critical and creative thinking should be a priority. The learning experiences and arsenal of resources curated for you here are yours to experiment with among your teams at Empower.
Empowering Your Thinking
Workshops, resources and micro-learning
Workshop: The Six Thinking Hats
This special 'team tools' workshop shows you how to utilise one of the most underrated creative exercises of all time — The Six Thinking Hats. Created by psychologist, philosopher and father of lateral thinking Edward de Bono, this Swiss Army Knife for the mind shifts creative perspectives, solves problems and busts biases. Plus, it's really really fun. Sign up today to try it with your team!
Tool: Visual Collisions
Experiment with a playful, punchy and purposeful approach for sparking imaginations and warming up a team's thinking. And you can also put real, live challenges in the middle too, to get the ideas going at the start of a project.
Experiment: Pre-mortems
Cited in Annie Duke's fantastic Thinking in Bets, pre-mortems are fun, predictive tools that unearth and solve the problems your new project or opportunity will face before they even happen. Try one today with your team and start purposefully preparing for the road ahead.
Tool: The Five Why's
Here's a simple and effective framework for collectively identifying the root causes of a problem, exposing aspects you may have overlooked, and making up your mind about what to act on. What can you ask 'why?' five times in relation to this week?
This short course of micro-learning was designed in collaboration with philosopher, and author of How to Think, Tom Chatfield. Over five consecutive days, Tom offers up a mode of critical thinking — from curious questioning to problem definition — and arms you with a practical insight or thought experiment to get going with that day. A brilliant, practical mental stretch with lots to discover, try and apply among your team.