A Mindful Approach to Team Creativity and Collaboration in Organizations

Book excerpt: 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 book offers 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.