Critical Thinking & Innovation
Creating Innovations in the Workplace
Generate options, challenge assumptions, and test promising ideas to bring practical innovation into your work.
Standard version
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This course builds practical capability in workplace innovation methods. Participants learn to generate options, challenge assumptions, and test promising ideas, then plan how to use those skills at work.
What you'll learn
- Identify convergent and divergent thinkers and their roles in creativity and innovation
- Describe the effect of functional fixedness on the creative mind
- Utilize techniques for overcoming barriers to creativity
- Use course methods to generate options, challenge assumptions, and test promising ideas in a workplace scenario.
- Develop an innovation experiment plan aligned to a relevant work need.
What you'll be able to do
- Identify a workplace need connected to workplace innovation methods.
- Select an appropriate way to generate options, challenge assumptions, and test promising ideas.
- Explain the reasoning behind that choice and identify its limitations.
- Produce an innovation experiment plan that addresses a relevant work need.
- Set review points for an innovation experiment plan and identify one adjustment.
Agencies need new ideas to improve service, reduce waste, and meet changing demands. This course helps federal employees and leaders generate options, challenge assumptions, and test promising ideas within the realities of government work. It supports the innovation competency within OPM's Achieving Results Executive Core Qualification.
What you'll learn
- Identify how different thinking styles contribute to innovation.
- Describe barriers to creativity, including habits and organizational constraints.
- Apply techniques for generating and refining new ideas.
- Evaluate ideas based on mission value, feasibility, and risk.
- Develop a plan to test a promising idea on a small scale.
What you'll be able to do
- Generate practical ideas for improving their work.
- Challenge assumptions that limit new approaches.
- Evaluate ideas using clear, mission-focused criteria.
- Pilot improvements responsibly within agency guidelines.
- Encourage innovative thinking on their teams.