Lateral ThinkingÔ : How to Accelerate Your Pace of Innovation

Aerospace Company Description:

Lateral ThinkingÔ is a tool kit of systematic, creative thinking techniques that will enable you to deliberately break-out-of-the-box and generate innovative solutions on demand. These powerful process tools from the lateral thinking tool kit (listed below) will help you create or improve: new products, processes, technologies, services, and find new uses for old technologies. Joel Barker, one of America’s famous futurists, tells us we need to get out of our paradigms. Dr. Edward de Bono is the creator of lateral thinking which provides us with the tool kit to enable us to break our paradigms and create the next profitable new way.

Home answering machines enable us to keep in touch in our busy lives. Laptop computers travel everywhere with us. These are examples of ideas that have created new industries, made life easier, and changed the way we live and work. Good ideas have tremendous power. Lateral thinking is the tool kit to help unlock our thinking so we can accelerate our pace of innovation on demand.

Outcomes: Upon completion of this course you will be able to:

1.      Think outside the box on demand

2.      Systematically increase your practical new idea output

3.      Structure powerful creative thinking sessions that deliver practical solutions

4.      Constructively challenge the status-quo

5.      Make creativity a regular part of your everyday business practice to ensure your market leadership

      Audience: This intense two day skill building course is designed for people who want to: 

• develop a workable level of creative skill

• find new ways to solve problems creatively

• create their company’s/department’s future

• learn practical new process tools to move quality/change efforts forward

• improve their sales and marketing efforts

• improve product development efforts

• want a common idea and innovation process to use with intact work teams  

Lateral Thinking Tools to Accelerate Innovation include:

          Focus - How to organize creative thinking in order to generate ideas where you need to and want to. Discipline

·      Creative Hit-List - How to set up a department/job creative hit-list in order to weave innovation into your regular business practices to “out think” your competition

·      Random Entry - How to use random input as a starting point in order to move to new ideas and open up fresh new tracks of thinking

·      Concept Triangle - How to extract concepts from ideas and use them to generate more and more ideas. To become idea greedy

·      Challenge - WHY? ABC - How to systematically and constructively challenge the status-quo in order to discover untapped areas for improvement and new ways of doing things

·      Provocative Operation “PO” - How to set up three different types of provocation’s (wishful thinking, escape, reversal) in order to escape to a new side track and move forward to new ideas and workable solutions

·      Harvest - Discover the power in harvesting ideas in order to move to implementation and to bank ideas for future use. Gain more value from your ideation time investment  

This course is also available in a customized format for intact work teams, new project teams and departments wanting a common idea development process and language that will enable them to maximize the creative thinking power of each person on the team.  

Creativity is generating ideas

Innovation is turning ideas into profitable uses

Lateral Thinking is the process - the how to

Six Thinking Hats sets the framework for productive creative thinking

DATT is a tool kit of critical and analytical thinking tools focused on broadening our perception, a necessary ingredient for idea evaluation and development

For more details go to the instructor's website at www.LyndaCurtin.com

Lynda Curtin, The Opportunity Thinker, is a member of the de Bono Thinking Systems Global network, a de Bono organization.