Shirley and Jim had put together a part of the project proposal for the development of creative traits across the workforce.
“Neuroscientists have discovered that the brain keeps growing over time. Experience is a key factor in brain growth. That’s why Shirley and I have developed this plan to expand the brain capacity of your workforce. We can’t promise you that any one person will become more creative, but I believe we can expand on some individual traits that are essential to creativity.”
“Thanks Jim”, said Shirley. The traits we want to focus on are curiosity, confidence, purpose, and acceptance. These are all in the category of having a growth mindset.”
“We know what doesn’t work. You can’t develop these traits with training programs. I’m sure that all of us have been turned off by rah-rah lectures that are essentially cheerleading sessions.”
“What we want to do is to make the development of these traits on ongoing experience. The first thing we want to do is to provide every employee with weekly stories of people who are exemplars of the traits we will be focusing on. I have already written a number of these stories. They are stories of little-known people who made a different with their lives. The stories are inspirational but not preachy. They are 2–3-minute reads in common everyday language.”
“Let me add something”, said Jim. “We know from fMRI tests that these kinds of messages create a growth mindset. They also become a connector to each person and help create possibilities for each individual to think about.”
Shirley continued: “We plan to release these each week. There will be no expectation of anything connected to the story. What we hope that the stories will do is to grow that part of the brain where ideas flourish.”
“Jim and I also propose that we post trivia questions each week to add some fun to work. Our trivia questions will focus on beginnings. For example, who invented the spoon? We would like to invite employees to contribute their own trivia questions.”
“What we are trying to do is to develop that part of the brain where curiosity resides. Jim showed me savory results when we first met that showed creativity scores for 5-year-olds at 98% and adults at 2%. We hope that these messages and trivia questions will inspire and generate creative thinking.”
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“The mind is just like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets and the more it can expand.” – Idowu Koyenikan