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CRITICAL THINKING AND CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING (G079)

Complete List > Critical Thinking

WHY SHOULD YOU ATTEND?

Are you working in an ever-changing, tumultuous environment? Are you being asked to "be creative" or "innovative" as you respond to complex situations, the likes of which you've never dealt with before? Do false starts, narrow thinking, and a lack of processes to support productive collaboration frustrate you?

Creative problem solving is a deliberate process that helps you adapt to changing situations, organize your thinking, cope with gaps in information, generate ideas, make better, more informed decisions and is essential to any attempt at innovation. Critical thinking enables a deeper understanding of ideas, data, arguments and situations through deliberate processes that help you make sense, find meaning, create knowledge and gain control over your environment.

Critical Thinking and Creative Problem Solving is designed to support participants in increasing the skill and confidence with which they apply best practices to foster critical thinking and creative problem solving. It provides insight into the breadth of skills that come into play in both critical and creative thinking processes and how these must be deliberately engaged in creative problem solving. The course is suitable for personnel across the full range of functions — administrators and professionals to managers — and in communications or other areas. And the course puts creativity and innovation into a government context referencing the government's innovation agenda and drawing upon the Canada School of Public Service's 2006 Action-Research study to promote creativity at work.

Takeaways include a re-usable Creative Problem Solving process booklet to guide your thinking step-by-step; "thinker toys"; the results of your personal FourSight Breakthrough Thinking^TM assessment; and references and resources to support continuous learning.

The content in this course is complemented by G055 Strategic Thinking.

WHAT WILL YOU LEARN?

• Where in the creative process you draw your energy and where you most comfortably fit within a team.
• Whether you are a "clarifier, ideator, developer or implementer."
• The habits of mind essential to critical thinking.
• The mind set critical to creative problem solving.
• The relationship between critical thinking and creative thinking and how they work together in the creative problem solving process.
• A simple, proven and repeatable creative problem solving process.
• How the creative problem solving process helps you organize your thinking about problems and challenges to make better decisions.
• Guidelines for creative thinking and critical thinking.
• Tools that that can be used to support each phase of the creative problem solving process.

FEDERAL GOVERNMENT COMPETENCY

• Thinking Things Through: Innovating through analysis and ideas
• http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/tal/kcl/ekl-eng.asp
  

Agenda
8:45 - 9:00	Introductions and Workshop Overview
9:00 - 10:30	Critical Thinking… a Critical Component to Creative Problem Solving What does it take to be a critical thinker? Participants will complete the "Are you a Critical Thinker?" quiz, explore aspects of critical thinking and the characteristics of critical thinkers. The relationship between critical thinking and creative problem solving will be introduced as will the mind set that is critical to creative problem solving.
10:30 - 10:45	Break
10:45 - 12:00	How do you Approach a Challenge? Participants will complete the FourSight Breakthrough ThinkingTM assessment to understand where in the creative process they draw their energy and will develop awareness of the impact their personal thinking preferences have on problem solving and team performance.
12:00 - 13:00	Lunch
13:00 - 14:30	Introducing the Creative Problem Solving Process Participants will be introduced to the creative problem solving process (CPS), guidelines for creative thinking and critical thinking, and the importance of phrasing challenges as questions. Participants will then be introduced to their CPS tool kit and how to select a tool based on the phases of the creative problem solving process.
14:30 - 14:45	Break
14:45 - 15:30	Using the Creative Problem Solving Process
15:30 - 16:30	Taking it Forward, Wrap-up and Workshop Evaluation Building on their learning from the entire day, participants will be encouraged to identify strategic actions they can take to influence the application of critical thinking and creative problem solving in their workplace. Participants will complete a short evaluation.