How to Train Out-of-the-Box Thinking, Part 3 – Empathy and Creative Problem Solving

An emotionally safe environment is one where everyone feels comfortable with anyone else. By demonstrating leadership in emotions and being willing to model correct emotional behaviors the team of faculty help students to feel safe.

During the course, there are many exercises designed to demonstrate various behaviors. Always, always we demonstrate them for the students.

Not only these exercises but also all behavior we expect from them. If we must act silly, we do it. If we must act serious, we do it also.

In addition, we model behavior that we are expecting to take place in the class. We cannot teach them divergent thinking and close our minds to suggestions they may have.

We do have in place mechanisms to capture their daily wishes, improvements, points they did not understand and at the end we demonstrate that what we teach is what we practice.

Before we start a new topic, we want the students to understand what it is that we are going to cover so we create exercises which raise the curiosity on that particular subject. For example, before we teach the blocks to creativity, we ask the students to do something creative and discuss what kept them from going even further “out of the box”. That usually creates a lively discussion which leads to the subject we want to teach.

Another example may be a warning that some students will feel uncomfortable with a given exercise. For instance, if the exercise involves messiness, those who are perfectionists may feel a certain discomfort and that is the nature of the beast! You must get your hands dirty if you want to plant a garden.

This step is self-explanatory: We teach what we aroused the curiosity about and if possible, we demonstrate it so that they truly “get it”

And again, we tell them what the benefits are of what we covered and how it is to be used in their lives or in the business they are in. The most important part of this step is a thorough debriefing.

The debriefings we do are based on the 3-step or 3-question debrief. The 3 questions are:

1. • What….?
   • So, what….?
   • Now what….?

In other words, what happened or what did you learn?

And how did that affect what you do?

And finally, how are you going to use it or what are you going to do as a result of learning it?

Powerful insights come out of these discussions. By the way, these discussions are best done in pairs and then shared with the room. More about this later.

Stress reduction is done by thoroughly explaining everything and making sure there are no questions. No student is left in the dark asking questions that go unanswered or being confused when out of the class.

To accomplish this, we make an upfront commitment that we will stay as long as it takes on any given day and the students can have access to us for coaching on any of the topics we teach. This is a huge commitment and there are nights that we are available until midnight, but this is the only way the students can be sure that they will have total comfort with the materials.

Another stress reduction mechanism we use is lots of ice breakers and warm up exercises so that the students enter a situation already warmed up and the stress factor is low. An example of this type of exercise might be a silly drawing they are asked to do representing a portrait of another student and they do it in the blind so that they do not see the drawing until it is finished. It results in lots of laughter which then prepares them for a divergence exercise and they feel it is OK to bring out “silly” ideas because they just had fun with everyone else and because everyone else can have “silly” ideas and that’s OK! But it is those silly ideas that may produce breakthrough thinking which otherwise would not have been produced.

Creative Focus is a consulting services and facilitation company that specializes in improving team dynamics and addressing challenges requiring creative solutions.

Don’t miss our next blog:

PART IV – The Fun Factor in Creative Problem Solving