Episode 177 – Work Better Together – Managing Thinking Preferences

The podcast by project managers for project managers. When it comes to problem solving or innovation, the goal is to generate ideas, make those ideas better, and then implement them to work better together.  Dr. Teresa Lawrence talks about understanding cognitive diversity, managing our thinking preferences to the stages of the creative problem-solving process, and how our preferences influence project team interactions.

Table of Contents

01:50 … FourSight Thinking Profile03:43 … Teresa’s Start in Cognitive Diversity06:45 … What is Cognitive Diversity?09:44 … Learning Thinking Tools11:13 … 15 Individual Thinking Preferences12:46 … Creating a Healthy Diversity15:40 … Keeping Everyone Engaged18:21 … Bill and Wendy’s Team Profile20:43 … Holding Ourselves Accountable22:50 … Communicating Thinking Preferences to Your Team27:35 … William’s Story30:44 … Find out More32:31 … Closing

TERESA LAWRENCE: The more that we know our preferences, the better teams we make.  And again, just to underscore this notion of this unconscious bias that we have.  It doesn’t matter that I like you or not like you.  When it comes to problem-solving, I’m probably going to find myself moving toward the people who solve it the similar way.  And isn’t that great?  And isn’t that dangerous?

WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and in the studio with me are Bill Yates and Danny Brewer. Today we’re talking to Dr. Teresa Lawrence.  She is recognized as a subject matter expert on the integration of creative problem-solving into project management. Since 2017 over 80,000 people have participated in her trainings, workshops, keynote facilitated sessions. She is a master facilitator of FourSight, the industry leading assessment that shows people their team preferences towards problem-solving and innovation. And she’s going to describe what FourSight is and go into a little more detail in our conversation. And we’re very excited to have her with us today. She’s also the president and owner of International Deliverables. 

BILL YATES:  Yeah, Teresa is going to be a great guest.  She’s going to take some of the elements that we talked about back on Episode 170 with Amy Climer, and she’s going to go further with it.  With Amy we talked about the creative problem-solving process, and there are four stages that we’ll refer to in the podcast:  clarify, ideate, develop, and implement.  Well, what Teresa’s going to say is, hey, we all have a preference for one of those four stages, or maybe a couple.  And our preferences can influence how we interact with a team.  So she’s going to dive into that and raise our awareness as project leaders so that we can be better with our teams.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Teresa.  Welcome to Manage This.  We’re grateful you’re here with us today.

TERESA LAWRENCE:  Thank you.  It’s a privilege, and it’s great fun to be with you this morning.  Thank you for having me.

FourSight Thinking Profile

WENDY GROUNDS:  Teresa, could you tell us what is the FourSight Thinking Profile, and just a little bit about the science behind it.

TERESA LAWRENCE:  So the FourSight assessment, typically known as FourSight, is a research-based assessment authored by Gerard Puccio, who is the department chair in what was formerly known as the International Center for Studies and Creativity, now recognized by title the Center for Applied Imagination, based on six years of research.  And so Gerard, masterful in the creative problem-solving process, said to himself, there are these stages of the creative problem-solving process.  Do people have a preference toward the stages?  And the answer is yes.  And so it has been validated by more than 20 academic journals.  It’s a reliable instrument that measures our thinking preferences.

It is an online assessment.  You can do it pen and paper, but it’s just quicker to do it online.  39 questions takes about 10 minutes.