Creative & innovative thinking

This year’s Project Management Conference in Dallas focused on all things innovation. Given my long-standing background with both project management and innovation, I was delighted to be on a panel that explored how project managers, their teams, and their company cultures could be more innovative.

Rob Lauber, Chief Learning Officer at McDonald’s Corporation, has a competence he may not be conscious of – an “unconscious competence,” a phrase coined by Noel Burch, a learning expert at Gordon Training International in the 1970s.

When we asked people who visited our ATD (Association for Talent Development) Expo booth this year in Denver, “What brought you to this conference?” they commonly answered that they were looking for “what’s next”… but for different reasons:

When experiencing change, one of the biggest productivity hindrances is a team that is not unified. This can be for a number of reasons, ranging from conflicting viewpoints among team members to a lack of confidence in the change process itself. Most often this lack of unity is present when team members are not proactively encouraged to contribute to the change process.