More creativity this morning.

This time an internal course on managing creativity and change.

I'm glad I hadn't been put off attending by the course I attended a few weeks back. This was very different.

I guess I'd been expecting more tips and techniques, but it was somewhat more management focussed. And I enjoyed that as it meant new things to learn and apply.

Prior to the day itself we'd had some prep work to do in the shape of Belbin's Team Role Analysis. We received the results of this amongst other things and then went through them with everyone in the room standing along the scale of our various strengths (or not). This was then applied to the creative process so we could see how we (or other team members) might best contribute.

I learned a lot about myself in the process. I came out very strongly as a 'plant' which may explain the meeting last Friday where a problem had been raised and I'd contributed quite a few 'thoughts' before feeling maybe I was overstepping the mark and shutting up. My two "least preferred roles" were as a 'coordinator' and as an 'implementer'. (Apparently the last have "practical common sense and a good deal of self-control and discipline" which is probably why I scored so low on that scale!)

But what was particularly interesting was that two colleagues were also present. H on the first of such days for her, and SE her office colleague. So with all three of us in the same team at the same level, I was intrigued by how we might compare. Perhaps somewhat worryingly they were both at the other end of the room when we lined up on the plant scale - especially as SE came out as an 'implementer' which was described as "intolerant of plants"!

But on a brighter note the three of us were absolutely identical on the 'team workers' scale and all three of us as high as anyone else in the room.

Fascinating.

6 hats was in the folder we were given, but we never talked about that.

The afternoon was spent doing some 'stakeholder analysis' and planning stakeholder commitment out of that. This was new to me and an interesting process that I only didn't really enjoy because I ended up in a group looking at age discrimination which got bogged down in some minutae of the law.