|
At UPS, Price commissioned the new-and-improved version of Wetzel’s “Innovate Like an Entrepreneur” course, the one with FourSight baked into it. They ran the first course in January, and participants gave it rave reviews.
“People loved it,” said Price. “It scored higher than any other training in my eight years at UPS.” After January’s pilot success, Price added several more courses to the 2020 calendar. Then COVID hit. In-person training was cancelled.
It was FourSight facilitator and course trainer, Russ Schoen, who proposed navigating a path to a virtual format. Price had her reservations. “I didn’t see how this kind of creative thinking and collaboration could actually work in a virtual training environment,” she said. “But if ever we needed creative thinking, we needed it now.” Schoen and Wetzel redesigned the course, hosting it on Zoom and facilitating the brainstorming with an online facilitation platform called Stormz.
In July, they ran the course again. This time it was all virtual. One participant admitted, “I was looking forward to the class, but dreading a 6 hour Zoom meeting. I was very surprised how well it worked and how quickly the time flew by. The seamless transitions between the Zoom general session, Zoom breakout rooms and Stormz was terrific. The virtual class may have held my attention better than in person.”
The course earned a 100% promoter score, meaning every participant would recommend it.
Aside from being popular and giving UPS employees a chance to reconnect and collaborate virtually with coworkers, the course was developing a new cognitive muscle at UPS. “Our company has always leaned toward incremental improvements over radical ones,” said Price. “This course is helping people get out of their comfort zone and think bigger.”
Course participant Joe Rayburn said, “I am that guy that wants to walk into a room, see the problem, crush it, and move on. That creativity piece is not a strength of mine.” As Senior Manager in Customer Technology Marketing, Rayburn said, “My biggest takeaway from this course was a framework for creativity. Walking away with a set of tools to help me drive toward a creative solution more effectively is really great.”
For another participant, Jake Hearron, Senior Director of Finance at UPS, the big takeaway was a tool called “POINt.” It taught him to respond to new ideas by first looking for their merits. He immediately recognized the value of the tool for senior leaders, who are quick to point out flaws and weaknesses of new ideas. “In hindsight I realize that there were so many ideas with potential that we may have shut down because of our approach,” he said. “I wish I could go back in time and handle things differently. Moving forward I will definitely employ the tools I learned in this workshop.”
FourSight facilitator Schoen finds it gratifying to see changes like this take place in people during the training. “It’s funny,” he said. “We teach people reading, writing and every other skill, but not creative thinking. Somehow we expect them to figure that out on their own. It’s a shame, when we have proven tools to help people think more creatively in the face of big challenges.”
Wetzel said, “It’s exciting to watch what happens when people are given a framework and tools to do creative problem solving. One group told us they got more ideas in six hours than they got in the past six months.”
“This is a great way to challenge teams to think differently,” said Price. “Innovation and creativity can come from anywhere and any team. At UPS, this program is helping us embrace that.”
To learn more about the "Innovate Like an Entrepreneur" course, contact Robyn Wetzel or Russ Schoen. Sarah Thurber is author of "The Secret of the Highly Creative Thinker" and "Creativity Unbound" and Managing Partner at FourSight.
|
.png){kind=icon}
.png?upscale=true&upscale=true&width=200&name=SBHF_RevisedLogo-02%20(1).png)
