Engaging Every Brain – Thinking Agility in a Post-Pandemic World

Engaging employees is one of the major ways to drive productivity, innovation, and employee satisfaction.  Different backgrounds, experiences and thought processes bring new and unique perspectives to an organization. Honoring every person’s contributions and establishing an environment that thrives on diverse thinking is key to enhancing creativity and engagement.

Whether creating a learning, purpose-driven, innovative, or customer-focused culture, they all require people to be agile in their thinking. Thinking Agility has been described as:

      “The ability to quickly and comfortably stretch beyond your default thinking preferences and biases to adapt to new circumstances.”

As humans, we look for patterns and shortcuts in how we think.  We go on autopilot and revert to our dominant thinking preferences which are the most comfortable for us especially in challenging, chaotic situations.  Forcing ourselves to move beyond this is the practice of thinking agility and how we can expand our mindset.  The walk-around below can also be helpful to stimulate our own thinking as well as embracing the thinking of others on our team to drive results:

© Herrmann Global, LLC 2021

Key Takeaway: We can capitalize on our own thinking agility by establishing a continuous learning mindset as a great way to stretch ourselves. To help build thinking agility into a team or organization, these are key things to consider:

• Incorporate Whole Brain learning design techniques to develop training
• Help everyone understand how to stretch their thinking and take on new challenges
• Encourage the building of diverse teams and incorporating thinking agility to get better results
• Empower teams to drive better brain engagement and adapt the way they communicate and deliver information

For more information and an excellent, complimentary white paper on Thinking Agility and Adapting HBDI for leaders, individual contributors, teams & organizations, please click here.