The Beacon Personal Skills Workshop held for both University and Schools Scholars focused on Creativity and Lateral Thinking.
The Beacon Personal Skills Workshop was delivered to both Schools and University Scholars over one day, on back-to-back Saturdays, in February 2022. The theme was Creativity and Lateral Thinking.
Following an ice-breaker, Session 1 was spent discussing and exploring the concept of Lateral Thinking. By exploring lateral and creative thinking processes, Scholars were challenged on their current thought processes and encouraged to use ‘out of the box’ and imaginative thinking to solve problems by viewing them from different perspectives.
Scholars were asked to review the following resources as Homework:
- Previous Beacon Workshops – Team Building 1, Team Building 2, Team Building 3
- Simon Sinek Video
- Zappos Webpage
- Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?
To give a flavour, here are some of the Slides and Exercises:
| Tools to Help Creative and Lateral Thinking | Exercise #1 – “5 Whys” |
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| Exercise #3 – Quiz | Exercise #4 – 6 Hats |
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During Exercise 4, Scholars explored the ‘6 Hats’ framework developed by Edward de Bono, which is a simple and effective system that increases productivity. Accordingly, there are six metaphorical hats, each defining a certain type of thinking. By wearing these hats in turn and switching between colours, Scholars were encouraged to alternate between different types of thinking and/or juggling wearing multiple hats simultaneously.
In the image below, School Beacons and Beacon Staff were pictured discussing the thinking associated with the ‘red’ hat, which allowed Scholars to talk about how they felt when solving problems with(out) judgement or justification.
