This module addresses the mindset orientation of employees and leadership. It highlights the mindset and the myths employees are bringing into the workplace that could be the anthesis to building a creative inclusive culture. We investigate how cultural lenses affect the interpretation of creativity and how the ability to create, collaborate, and innovate depends on the ability to have a growth mindset for intercultural development and creative thinking.

Employees engage in self-awareness development through the exploration of demographical diversity, cognitive diversity, and intersectionality of their identities through self-reflection.

Module Learning Objectives:

• Team members will confront and engage unconscious beliefs and misconceptions of intercultural competency, creativity, and inclusivity.
• Team members will be able to clearly communicate the developmental process of intercultural competency and creativity and place themselves on the developmental continuum.
• Team members will implement cultural awareness and sensitivity tools during professional meetings, small group meetings, and creative ideation sessions.
• Team members and leaders identify the four stages of psychological safety and the mindsets that accompany each stage. They will implement basic strategies to build psychological safety in current or future teams.

Having an open mind is the #1 indicator of a highly creative thinker as well as a highly culturally competent person. This intense yet psychologically safe training facilitates the mental development of identifying and dismantling prejudging mental blocks that inhibit open-mindedness and empathy.

This training focuses on the neuroscience behind unconscious bias training, which includes cultural bias, creative biases, and other cognitive biases that affect decision-making, hiring, promoting, and building interpersonal relationships. We utilize interactive training that highlights neurological and psychological insights on how our brain perceives culture and narrative. We teach mental tools for leaders and team members to manage and adjust for biases, unconscious beliefs, and self-limiting creative restraints.

Module Learning Objectives:

• Team members will activate their ‘social brain network’ to increase empathy and understanding and connection with others.
• Team members will understand how bias is formed in the unconscious mind and recognize the difference between affinity bias, confirmation bias, social comparison bias, and attribution bias in decision-making and creative ideation.
• Through the use of the Diversity Diamond, team members identify and discuss dominant and non-dominant positions on self-identified cultural demographics that influence life and work experiences.
• Team members will employ tools to give and take feedback around biased behavior and (SEA) language that increases belongingness and creative ideation success

How we view ourselves and other people is affected by culture. This also affects our ability to be creative and our ability to connect and internalize the creative ideas of others. After dealing with unconscious biases, we now focus on refining observable skills to increase the ability to sense environmental data as well as the nuances of cultural similarities and differences.

We learn how our neural networks, controlled our observations. Training in observation skills allows people to perceive data they would have otherwise missed for creative ideations and social connections. This same training in cultural observational also allows people to view complexities in others thereby increasing intercultural competency. Subtle Acts of Exclusion (SAE), also known as microaggressions, and allyship methods are introduced in this module.

Module Learning Objectives:

• Team member’s observational skills are heightened to perceive details in an environment that they previously did not perceive.
• Team members will become more self-aware of their lived experiences and cultural lenses that affect perceptions.
• Team members can identify and self-correct the use of SAE’s.
• Team members identify, understand, and celebrate demographical and cognitive diversity in themselves and in others.

If innovation is driven by creativity, then creativity is driven by curiosity. It is this same curiosity that is needed to develop intercultural competency. By implementing a consistent process of curious exploration, team members will engage ideas and people in a more complex and novel way. This is imperative for advancing Intercultural Creativity®. The primary method of increasing curiosity is utilizing the newly learned observation skills and applying an advanced process of questioning. We investigate how curiosity drives justice as well as innovation.

Seeking information to fill gaps of knowledge through culturally respectful questioning and investigation will strengthen psychological safety, increase inclusivity, and reveal new possibilities for innovation.

Module Learning Objectives:

• Teams members will become aware of mental and emotional blocks that inhibit curious exploration and implement tools to dismantle those blocks.
• Team members will increase environmental and professional experiences to increase curious thinking in their day-to-day routines.
• Team members will recognize and improve the quantity, variety, and quality of questions in environmental and cultural settings.
• Team members will strengthen imagination capabilities to increase 360 thinking in environmental and cultural settings.
• Team members will engage in respectful cultural curiosity that avoids microaggression (SAE) territory.

Participants who engage in perspective-taking exercises might not only provide new data in complex situations, but it can also activate networks in their brains that are associated with creative thinking and exploration. Perspective shifting often appears in problem-solving literature and is needed for empathy, creativity, cultural competence, and innovation yet few leaders invest time to develop this skill.

Perspective-taking skills can improve through training and activates the social brain network, which can also reduce implicit bias. Our program uses situational and artistic methods to sharpen and develop the ability to perspective shift in professional environmental experiences and cultural experiences. Empathy skills are further developed and imagination exercises, such as ‘fictive learning,’ are explored and utilized.

Module Learning Objectives:

• Team members will strengthen perspective-taking skills through the use of artistic, metaphoric, and narrative methods.
• Team members utilize various methods of communication to express new perspectives in order to discover hidden revelations.
• Team members learn how to identify and confront any biases or previously held beliefs that may negatively affect the perspective-taking process.
• Team members will develop the use of multiple sensory inputs to increase the perspective-taking experience.

The creative and intercultural skill of adaptation is now a critical skill in this VUCA environment (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous). Being able to adapt and create in uncertain situations is a skill that is developed in this module. Adaptation requires attribute training of courage and flexibility. This module incorporates previously learned skills of observation, questioning, empathy, imagination, functional agility, and perspective shifting to strengthen adaptation skills in personal, professional, and cultural situations.

Module Learning Objectives:

• Team members improve and develop improvisational skills in creative scenarios.
• Team members develop ‘foresight thinking’ and are able to ‘disrupt’ their own projects with futuristic imagination techniques.
• Team members understand and apply the neuroscience connections between decision-making and adaptation and can apply this understanding in ideation sessions.
• Team members will grow in ability to adapt in behavior in authentic and culturally appropriate ways.

Intercultural Creativity® is a developmental journey. As individuals advance in their ability to interculturally create, they will also grow in their ability to lead and be a bridge for others to do the same. This is the basis for strong leadership of intercultural teams. In this module, personal and professional leadership training is thoroughly taught with the Four Zones of Leadership, the Four Stages of Psychological Safety, and boundary spanning.

Module Learning Objectives:

• Team members and leaders implement strategies to build psychological safety in current or future teams and boundaries spanned between groups.
• Team members will synthesize previously learned skills and reapply them in leadership scenarios.
• Team members will reflect and align personal growth goals with professional and organizational growth goals.