Creative Cognicion in collaboration with Think Quick are offering a de Bono 6 Hats Training Workshop on December 9. Registration details can be found by going to:http://tinyurl.com/3y7va9s
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De Bono 6 Hats Workshop
Networks and Emergence
I have recently been reading an article by Meg Wheatley on the power of networks and emergence and how this contributes to organisational growth, knowledge and sharing. It challenges the traditional notion of change within an organisation whihc is often driven from the top down. Change is more likely to happen when people with similar ideas, values and ideals connect and influence , then connect up again with others. This starts on a small scale and grows through the possibilities of self organising networks.
It also led me to reflect on the work I have done using Cognitive Edge techniques and emergent principles. Much of this relies and successfully relies on the notion that the idea comes from an individual who then connects up with others and the change then has the possibility of growth.
For those who are interested I have attached the article via this link:Lifecycle meg Wheatley’s article
People Can Change
Recently I had some nice feedback from a group that I had facilitated a workshop with. The group had undergone significant change and it had proved painful. So painful to a point where the staff attitude survey showed the group were very disengaged and informal feedback showed they really did not like coming to work.
I had worked with them using narrative and issues identification, issues mapping using the Cynefin framework which is an excellent decision making and understanding tool. As a result they designed some probes and experiments they wanted to carry out. The important point of all of this is that the issues they identified were their issues and the ideas for resolution i.e the probes were their ideas…….thereby empowering a group who were pretty disempowered.
The feedback was that they were trying out the experiments and it was starting to make a difference in that people felt as though they were no longer being tossed around and that they were feeling so much more positive about being part of the group and being at work.
It is amazing what we can do if we listen to our people and allow them to take some responsibility and control for their own lives.
Ending Up in Surprising Places
Mayday Hills today
I have just finished workshops with some Government departments in Beechworth. The venue was LaTrobe at Beechworth which is the old Mayday Hills Mental Hospital. During the workshop I could not help reflecting that 20 years ago when I was a clinician in mental health I would never have suspected that I would have ended up facilitating creative thinking workshops as a consultant in the same venue as I was relocating patients from Willsmere to. Life seemed fairly straightforward then. Today we need so much more in terms of agile thinking ability. Apart from the notion we cannot necessarily predict what will be happening next, the world is so much more a complex place. Simple solutions and linear thinking no longer serve us well to deal with complex problems and make decisions in a world that can be unpredictable.
In relocating patients, the decisions made were not particularly complex, if they had family in Beechworth or nearby they went there. The decisions were also made in quite a hierarchical way. Today due to the complexity we often do not have the solutions to problems ourselves, but need multiple perspectives to solve problems and develop ideas and often the minute we do, everything changes as the elements shift and change and impact on one another. This is particularly the case in people stuff which is messy and complex. so we need to experiment and see what works.
The workshops were designed to help participants develop some of the thinking agility that is necessary today and not rush to solutions to a problem before the thinking took place. They were offered a framework of thinking and some tools to do this and engaged in developing probes and experiments they could take back to the workshop to assist with innovative thought.
More About Leadership
I was doing some reflecting after a workshop I undertook with an organisation around the notion of leadership and doing things differently. Quite often it seems we put people in leadership positions and do not enable them to be leaders. It is a difficult task and one that requires continuous growth and thinking. Being a decent person is simply not enough, but it does help.
I was reflecting on Beverley Alimo Metcalfe yet again. To quote: ” Leadership is a contact sport, not a virtual reality” and “Leadership is about everyone adding value to human interactions“. In other words leaders need to be engaged with their people and to enable their people. This does not mean micro management as we see so often in some public service contexts, but rather developing a relationship with people that encourages and supports and allows them to learn.
In the group that I was working with we talked about the notion of “chit chat” as they called it to develop the relationships with their staff and discovered that this was not as easy as it seemed but in fact tricky and quite hard work. Without the right support for the leaders, the default behaviour was avoidance rather than engagement or default to leadership being a virtual reality!!!!
Leadership
I had the pleasure of attending a Masterclass with Beverley Alimo-Metcalfe last week and came away thinking of how everything is intertwined. The notion of leadership and how it works( or in some cases doesn’t) is so instrumental in the health and well being of people and the ability of people to be innovative.
Our understanding of leadership is evolving and changing . The world is becoming more complex and requires different leadership from when things were either in crisis or life itself was simpler. Leaders now need to be agile, flexible and recognise that there are many who have ideas who are around them. These ideas need to be explored and exploited. In fact innovation does not come from the top but rather from the people within the organisation. Leaders need to stop beating people up for being innovative, taking risks and making mistakes. Alternatively all of this needs to be encouraged by the leader with recognition that learning and exploration and combined wisdom is what is powerful. How nicely this all interlinks with the Cognitive Edge approach which is underpinned by complexity theory, and anthropology. It recognises the wisdom of the crowd and that the distributed cognition of people is how ideas flourish. It recognises the need to experiment and do probes in a complex world……….in other words it demands things of our leaders that are now emerging as vital in leadership thought.
Most of all the notion of heroic leadership is now dead and can be seen to be down right dangerous when it leads to destructive acts. Leaders are now vlaued who are humble and engaged and have solid people skills of respect for people in their organisation and demonstrate this clearly in their interactions and behavoirs.
Creative Workplace Coaching
As part of its suite of offerings Creative Cognicion provides personalised workplace coaching for both groups and individuals. We work with clients to assess need and co-design outcome driven interventions to meet these needs.
Clients are assisted in the exploration and understanding of both complex workplace issues and interpersonal challenges. This includes helping our clients to understand the underlying emotional, cognitive and interpersonal issues that impact on their thinking and performance.
We also assist in applying a range of thinking and problem solving techniques that empower clients to see and incorporate multiple perspectives and develop innovative action oriented solutions. A perfect example of how this might work was over a yum cha lunch as featured in another blog post. A real life problem was identified, issues worked through and different techniques applied to help the client develop innovative solutions. Furthermore, it was undertaken in a setting other then the workplace which served to stimulate the thinking and subsequent solution development.
The workplace coaching service is offered to developing leaders both in an ongoing capacity and at more critical times in their working and personal lives. This has been successful in working with clients in health services, police and internationally including in times of change, transition and personal development.
For further information contact:
Laurel Sutton
Creative Cognicion
Laurel.sutton@cre-ativ-cognicion.com.au
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Tagged coaching, cognitive, complexity, creative, innovate, leadership, perspectives, problem solving, thinking
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Creative Cognicion-what it is about
I have recently finished a document which explains a bit about what Creative Cognicion is about. In essence we offer complex facilitation, change management ,organisational development, training and development and workplace coaching services.
Do let me know if you would like to know more????
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged change management, development, Introduction, organisational development, training
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Creative thinking over yum cha
I was recently in Hong Kong and met with two friends of mine who are teachers at one of the tertiary institutions in Hong Kong. We shared a meal together and talked about a number of things. They had a problem which was developing up a course and how to make it different so that it attracted people to come to the course. So we did some creative thinking. We developed a purpose focus for our thinking and then used green hat thinking to develop a whole range of ideas. We then applied a PMI ( plus, minus, interesting) to the ideas and then took the ideas and applied OPV ( other people’s view) to think about how they might be presented to the hierachy of the organisation. The strength of this is that it was done in a setting that was different from our usual environment, and it applied de Bono tools to a practical problem and turned the ideas into possible actions.
This set me thinking. Is it possible to do a “De Bono cafe” a combination of the work developed by David Gurteen (knowledge cafes) and that of Edward de Bono. I will think on this some more and see what emerges.
Thinking about how to describe yourself
I was recently working with a client who was having trouble describing who they were and what their achivements were in order to polish up their CV. So we developed a mindmap of them….full colour and lots of drawings. They found it very useful, not only as a way of developing their thinking about themselves and then expanding to a full CV, but for the purposes of stimulating conversations. There was a enough there in the mindmap for people they showed it to to ask questions and to have their curiosity raised
This is what I look like as a mindmap.
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