A Mindful Approach to Team Creativity and Collaboration in Organizations
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A Mindful Approach to Team Creativity and Collaboration in Organizations

Creating a Culture of Innovation

Melinda J. Rothouse

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eBook - ePub

A Mindful Approach to Team Creativity and Collaboration in Organizations

Creating a Culture of Innovation

Melinda J. Rothouse

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About This Book

This book examines how contemplative arts practice and a mindful approach to creativity, can be used to offer new possibilities for facilitating team creativity and collaboration in organizational settings. The author employs a qualitative, action research paradigm, using arts?based and ethnographic methods, to explore the perceived effects of a contemplative arts workshop process on team creativity and collaboration within an organization. The book demonstrates how a contemplative arts workshop process may be used to facilitate mindfulness, trust, communication, collaboration, and creative insights among teams and working groups. It explores each of these themes in depth and develops a model based on those findings. The model includes five elements: 1. Individual-Level Mindfulness, 2. Trust and Authentic Communication, 3. Team Cohesion and Collaboration, 4. Creative Ideation and Insights, and 5. Leadership: Creating a Culture of Innovation. Combining theory and practice, the bookoffers a series of mindfulness and contemplative arts exercises that facilitators can use to address each of the five levels of the model.
This book weaves together contemporary psychological research on mindfulness and organizational creativity along with practical applications and contemplative arts exercises for practitioners and scholars of workplace creativity, management and organisational and industrial psychology.

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© The Author(s) 2020
M. J. RothouseA Mindful Approach to Team Creativity and Collaboration in OrganizationsPalgrave Studies in Creativity and Innovation in Organizationshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47675-5_1
Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Melinda J. Rothouse1
(1)
Psychology, Saybrook University, Austin, TX, USA

Abstract

This book explores how mindfulness and contemplative arts practices can help to foster team creativity and collaboration in organizational settings. The introduction orients the reader to the subject of mindfulness and contemplative arts, and presents a five-level model of how mindfulness practices can support team creativity and collaboration which will be elaborated throughout the book. The introduction also describes the organization of the book, which presents relevant research into mindfulness and creativity in organizations, as well as practical, mindfulness-based exercises designed to foster creative collaboration among organizational teams.
Keywords
MindfulnessContemplative artsTeam creativityCollaborationOrganizational creativity
End Abstract
This book explores how mindfulness and contemplative arts practices can help to foster team creativity and collaboration in organizational settings. The research and practices presented here include the key findings from my doctoral research (Rothouse, 2018), which explored the relationship between mindfulness and creativity in organizations, focusing on how mindfulness and contemplative arts practices may be used to facilitate and develop team creativity and collaboration. This book also reviews new research that has emerged in this rapidly developing field over the last few years, presenting the most recent scholarship on mindfulness and creativity in organizations.
My doctoral research developed out of my personal journey as a mindfulness and contemplative arts practitioner and teacher as well as my professional work as a coach, consultant, and facilitator focusing on creativity, career development, and leadership for individuals and organizations. These experiences informed my studies into the psychology of creativity and inspired me to explore how mindfulness and contemplative arts practices could be used to stimulate creativity and collaboration in organizational settings.
This book also synthesizes what I have learned from my explorations of mindfulness, team creativity , and organizational leadership in working directly with leaders, teams, and individual contributors working in a range of contexts from small startups and non-profit organizations to state agencies and major corporations like Dropbox, Indeed, Apple, and Dell. My professional experience as a coach and consultant has given me a window into organizational functioning (and dysfunction) across a broad range of industries, including technology, marketing and advertising, accounting and finance, architecture and engineering, state and local government, the non-profit sector, and academia.

My Journey with Mindfulness and Contemplative Arts

I began practicing mindfulness meditation in 2004 while living in New Orleans, Louisiana, and working as an academic advisor and adjunct professor at Tulane University. I had studied Buddhism extensively from a historical and cultural perspective during my master’s program in religious studies, but I had never developed a personal meditation practice up to that point. I initially began practicing meditation at the suggestion of a therapist to work with stress and anxiety. While I found it beneficial for my state of mind, it was also difficult to cultivate a regular sitting meditation practice on my own without additional support.
In August 2005, as I was preparing for the new academic year at Tulane, the winds of Hurricane Katrina blew through my world, along with thousands of others who lost their homes, their jobs, and even their lives. Katrina was an incredibly traumatic event for so many people, and it forever changed the course of my life. After a period of uncertainty and confusion, I ended up in Austin, Texas, where I had to rebuild my life and my career essentially from scratch. After settling in Austin, I also went through the breakup of a long-term relationship, which left me feeling more uprooted and unsettled than ever. As a result, I began attending a local meditation center where I received the support and encouragement to cultivate a daily meditation practice, along with a community of like-minded souls who would become my sangha.
I started taking classes and weekend retreats focusing on meditation and mindfulness, including a series of courses on contemplative arts. As I will describe in more detail in the following chapter, the contemplative arts encompass a variety of practices rooted in the traditions of Asian Buddhism that foster a mindful approach to art and creativity. Traditional contemplative arts disciplines included calligraphy, landscape painting, the tea ceremony, and many other forms. As contemplative arts practices have developed over time, they now also include photography and many other artistic disciplines, with a primary focus on the creative process itself, and on the state of mind of the practitioner, rather than simply on the end product. In my own experience, I have found the contemplative arts process to be very liberating and enlivening, offering a fresh approach to creativity. For example, starting in junior high school, I trained as a classical singer, with years of operatic voice lessons and workshops, and later became a singer-songwriter. Yet by my mid-30s, my personal musical practice had begun to feel stale and somewhat forced, even obligatory. When I began taking contemplative arts classes, I rediscovered the joy of creativity, with permission to play, to not know, and to approach the creative process as children do, with a “beginner’s mind,” as Zen Buddhist teacher Shunryu Suzuki (1970/2007) called it.
The contemplative arts teachings, as taught by Tibetan-born Buddhist teacher Trungpa Rinpoche and his students, emphasized opening to the senses and appreciating the vividness of our everyday world, in all of its richness. The exercises I learned and practiced in my contemplative arts training helped me to see the ways my mind would habitually label, categorize, and judge my experience, and allowed me to open more and more to the direct experience of the phenomenal world. Meditation and mindfulness practice allowed me to settle my mind and open to the possibilities that exist in “Square One” (Trungpa, 1996/2008), the space of infinite possibilities represented by the blank page, the fresh canvas, or the uncarved block, as the Taoists refer to it. Experimenting with creativity in this way brought me a tremendous amount of joy and lent a fresh energy to my songwriting and performance practices.
I also began to study contemplative photography during this time, which helped bring the principles of contemplative arts alive for me in an even more tangible way. In contemplative photography, we use the camera to help sharpen our sense of vision, to really see what is around us in a new way, including ordinary objects, scenes, and things we might otherwise take for granted and not really “see.” Contemplative photography is a meditative practice that requires slowing down and paying attention. The goal is not to take beautiful pictures, but to simply see what is before us and use the camera to convey what we see, including color, pattern, texture, light and shadow, form, and shape (Karr & Wood, 2011; McQuade & Hall, 2015). The photos may appear very abstract, conveying vivid hues, striking forms, or simply the unexpected beauty of everyday objects, whether natural or human-created. The result is often surprising and extremely powerful, as the following images may help to illustrate.
These images, born of my own contemplative arts practices, express something of the contemplative arts process as well as what can arise from this type of mindful approach to creativity. The first image, a photograph, includes the elements of color, light and shadow, and organic pattern, drawing the viewer’s attention to the sensuous shape of the leaves, how their curved lines play off of each other, how the light shines through them, revealing pattern and contrast. I remember marveling at this play of light upon the leaves, such a mundane but marvelous display of mother nature only existing for a moment before the sun shifted (Fig. 1.1).
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Fig. 1.1
Leaves. (Photo by Melinda Rothouse)
To this day it remains one of my favorite photographs, and I can r...

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