Creativity and collaboration: helping students discover and use their "mind patterns" and "thinking skills"

Creativity, collaboration, mind patterns, thinking skills, conflict resolution

The great bulk a creative work in business occurs in teams. But courses on creativity in business focus primarily on creativity as an individual phenomenon. Being creative in a team requires additional skills. Developing skill in recognizing and accommodating differences in “mind patterns” and “thinking skills” can account for many of the incompatibilities that business people encounter in project teams. The proposed workshop would focus on ways to introduce these two constructs two students and to allow them to understand and plan for the different ways that team members process and act upon information. The workshop would give participants experience in diagnosing and then making use of their own individual mind patterns and thinking skills. The workshop draws on the author’s experience in teaching an undergraduate class focused on creativity and collaboration.