That's awesome!

Hi Lauren,

We gathered feedback every day and that drove the development of the platform. We dealt with issue of visibility, bugs in the software, suggestions for improvement and ease of use. Every daily session that I worked with the participants, I took notes and sent their suggestions on to Erik so the software could be edited and the program refined. We are trying to figure out next steps. When I ran across this challenge, I thought that our platform would work nicely with teams of employees to develop creative action plans to promote gratitude in the workplace.

Hi Lauren,

Our prototyping has been conducted primarily with secondary and post secondary students. In 2014-2015, secondary students, ages 11-18 at a residential treatment center, participated in the pilot program that consisted of 28 fifty minute weekly sessions during school. Students were digitally introduced to a variety of creative problem solving models that were applied to the local and global challenges such as environmental awareness, inventing and entrepreneurship.

Based on research conducted on the pilot program, 73% of the participants (N=27) realized an increase in their creativity scores. The average gain for overall test scores was 17.3 points, an 85% increase between pre and post testing. The SPSS results indicated significant increases (p<.05) in fluency, originality, elaboration and overall creativity. Unfortunately we did not have a control group.

The Massachusetts Future Problem Solving Program has been using our platform for their team-based work for several years. We have initiated efforts to provide our platform to middle school aged students to solicit their ideas, solutions and action plans to address real world problems called the Beyonders Program - http://www.beyonders.org

We are currently marketing a creativity assessment for adults in the workplace - http://www.vcaiteam.com To address the call for training, I developed an e-book with personal and organizational applications of the creative abilities identified by the assessment - the VCAI (VAST Creative Abilities Indicator). It provides real world responses to a creative problem solving process based on the 4 normative abilities identified by the VCAI. I included such issues as: How can you improve employee morale? and What ingredients are needed to produce quality? I believe a compelling problem solving process can be developed around understanding and promoting gratitude in the workplace using our platform.

Our platform is in place. We will only need to develop the prompts to lead the teams through the creative problem solving process. We will need to secure the participation of a business/organization that will designated teams to participate. Teams will then access our platform and work through the steps. The responses will depend on the team members, so it is a truly creative process. The results will be unique action plans developed by the teams to inspire more authentically grateful workplaces