Facilitated Thinking Environments: The Assembly Line for an Information Age Workforce

The rapid increase in change is outpacing our ability to handle it. Clearly, society must now develop information workers who apply on-demand cognitive tools to think through change in addition to training and to learning their way through change. The future in education and business training is to prepare workers with new skill sets.

Industrial age worker education was answer and problem-solving orientation, content memorization, and analytical, rational, and logical thinking skills. Thinking is based on using past and present data that already exists. In contrast, the information age worker’s education is question and innovation oriented, focused on accessing content on-demand, is change-adept, and promotes innovative thinking skills, as well as thinking based on using present and future data that does not yet exist.

Just as the invention of the assembly line and factory automation tools improved industrial-worker labor productivity, the invention of Facilitated Thinking Environments (FTEs) and cognitive tools, called thinklets, will improve information-worker thinking productivity.

Who should attend: Anyone who wants to become a more innovative and change-adept thinker.
What you’ll learn: Each participant will walk away with knowledge and some tools on how to become an innovative thinker in three facilitated thinking environment areas: (1) personal innovation, (2) collaborative innovation, and (3) enterprise team innovation.
How this new knowledge can be applied: Cognitive tools will be given to the participants. These tools can be applied to help participants develop more and better innovative ideas.

Robert Pavlik, assistant director, Institute for the Transformation of Learning, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Dennis Heindl, founder and president, Nth Degree Software, Inc., Greendale, Wisconsin.

key words: innovation, creativity, education
issue areas: Business and Careers, Learning and Education, Futures Methodologies