Conquer fear; usher in creative thought
By Sarun ChantapalaboonPublished on September 24, 2008
On Wednesday September 17, about 50 protesters, wearing green, pink, purple and blue headbands, marched along a footpath carrying banners with messages that were unusual requests. "Get out … thinking frame", "Go away … same old ideas", "Welcome creative thinking". The protest lasted just about 10 minutes and went off without any violence.
What had happened a few days earlier?
Our training team tried to come up with experiential training activity that could help the client's trainees understand the impact of creative thinking. The course was "Be Creative @ Work". The prerequisite was that the activity must reinforce the training content, of which one tenet was to get rid of the "box mindset" that limits creative thinking. Among the many boxes, fear seemed to be the one affecting Thais the most.
"Let's protest" was one of the ideas being thought out loud.
Dear readers of The Nation, what do you think about this idea?
At first, many objections come to mind but we must kept them aside and do the PPCO - one of the creative-thinking processes. PPCO stands for:
P: Pluses: What is good about the idea? Is it memorable, helps us get rid of fear, covers all three styles of learners (auditory, visual, kinesthetic) blah blah blah …
P: Potential: What is good about it, keeping the future in mind? It will remind the trainees of this training session and will act as an anchor and link up with the training content. It might even be applicable to other training sessions.
C: Concerns: What are the worries? We may get arrested.
O: Opportunities: How do we overcome the worries? After consulting a legal expert, we found it is legal to demonstrate as long as we stay on the footpath.
What happened that day?
While thinking about phrases to write on the banner, the trainees had a chance to internalise and reflect on the content delivered earlier. Not surprisingly, most of them expressed different fears. Thus, we had a chance to review the steps for getting rid of fear, which we had trained on earlier, and got to apply them to a real-life situation. Finally, we did it
What happened afterward?
The trainees felt good. They experienced that "fear is fake". That emotion was not as big as the perception of it before we took action. This in turn led to opening up doors for the creative-thinking process and the techniques taught through that day.
What did we learn?
"No fear … No same old ideas!"
Sarun Chantapalaboon is the chief learning officer at 37.5 Degree Celsius.
E-mail him at A.Sarun@375c.com or call him on (089) 5009289.
You can also visit the company website at http://www.375c.com/.
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