To achieve extraordinary outcomes, innovative thinking is essential at all levels of the organization. Successful organizations operate on the edge of chaos and embrace risk, error, and ambiguity, while practicing innovative strategies that reduce the need for doing, undoing and redoing.
This program will provide practical tools, grounded in the latest neuroscience research, to help leaders shape the future.
In a highly interactive session, participants will identify principles of thinking that can be applied to their own environments, to help them question implicit assumptions, seize opportunities, and develop the adaptive capacity to work creatively with change and uncertainty.
This high- level critical thinking course will help participants surface what is otherwise invisible to them.
Based on Dr. Firstenberg's research and body of work for decades at UCLA Anderson MBA programs, UCLA Anderson Executive Education programs and UCLA Department of Psychology, as well as the fact that her PhD in cognitive neuroscience ( focus on memory and learning), the framework of this program is a result of research in multiple fields with multiple examples from real-world situations that illustrate the concepts and dynamics at work. This program centers around creative innovation and innovative thinking strategies. Participants will be introduced to the provocative strategy of bringing the future to the present to help individuals, teams and organizations conquer uncertainty by eliminating it where possible, reducing where we can, and positioning ourselves to embrace it everywhere else.
Dr. Iris Firstenberg is an Adjunct Professor of Psychology, UCLA and Adjunct Professor of Management at UCLA Anderson. She specializes in strategies for creative problem solving and innovative thinking. She also conducts programs on creativity and innovation for a wide cross-section of Fortune 500 organizations, including companies in aerospace, software, automotive, healthcare, entertainment, defense, telecommunications, energy, financial services, retail, and pharmaceuticals, as well as government agencies such as NASA.
Her latest book, Extraordinary Outcomes: Shaping an Otherwise Unpredictable Future (John Wiley & Sons, 2014), provides a practical framework to help organizations navigate in a world of uncertainty. Dr. Firstenberg is the recipient of the 2002 UCLA Department of Psychology Faculty Distinguished Teaching Award and the 2011 UCLA Extension Distinguished Teaching Award.