Understanding Thinking - The Key to Effective Collaboration
Successful innovation of creative ideas requires the application of specific types of thinking at the appropriate times in the overall sequence. This is very difficult to achieve without understanding these thinking processes and how they work.
This is what makes Effective Intelligence so tremendously powerful, because it provides a language that allows you to recognise and harness the individual components of thinking, providing your organisation (or indeed yourself) with an immense advantage.
Effective Intelligence provides you with a game-changing tool, the Rhodes’ Thinking-Intentions Profile. By simply answering 24 questions, each of your team members can reveal their own individual and unique thinking profile.
Equipped with each individual’s profile, you can see where their true preferences lie when it comes to thinking. This changes the game, because you can then allocate each person to the specific point of the innovation process where they will be most capable and effective.
Some people really do have a strong preference for creative thinking. They can be an endless source of brilliant new ideas, and perhaps one of those ideas could transform everything for your organisation. As we discussed previously, these people are actually the rarest in the population.
Others may not take so easily to creative ideas, and that’s fine. Not everyone can be creative, nor should they be. The reason is that these people are probably perfect for the later stages of the innovation process.
Every new idea requires background research to ensure it’s sound. The specifics need to be handled, and it’s important that you have detail-oriented people who can do a good job with this. Most often, the creative types are not so into this part!
Ideas also need to be tested rigorously to ensure that they can withstand all real-world conditions. Usually, refinements are needed before the idea can be implemented without failing. This is yet another thinking skill-set in itself.