Reflection 5

My perception of “good” thinking has definitely evolved throughout this course. I remember thinking during our first class when we had to do the “Business in a Backpack” exercise, “Wow, I haven’t done anything like this since elementary school. This is pretty cool!” Why is it that kind of creativity gets lost or isn’t fostered as we move on into higher education? This course was really great because it got me to reconnect with my creative side and to remember the value in activating the right side of my brain.

I say that my perception of “good” thinking has changed because I feel that throughout the course of my BCom, we have always been taught a very methodological, analytical, process-based way of thinking and that if we approach a problem this way, we will come up with the right answer. Perhaps “good” is the wrong word to use but more that my perception of thinking has changed in the sense that it needs to be more balanced. Although it is good to approach a problem in an analytical, strategic, and process-based kind of way, it is not the only way to approach a problem. This course has taught me that by using divergent thinking skills, we may be able to generate a solution that is better than just using convergent tools. The solution could be more forward-thinking, more out-of-the-box, and more in-depth if we integrated design thinking into our thinking processes as well.

I really enjoyed working with De-Brand and also meeting the other start-up CEOs. It was cool to learn about what was going on in the local technological start-up space and to learn about these businesses successes and also the obstacles they faced. I found the business canvas project extremely rewarding, and more so the discussion that occurred during our presentation to the CEOs. The advice they provided to us being always push the boundaries, always look to see how you can add more value to anything, always look at new ways at how you can approach a problem, look at a problem, and solve a problem was a game-changer for me.

I found myself trying to approach a problem with more balance between convergent and divergent thinking strategies. In my marketing projects especially, I found myself brainstorming and free writing first to generate ideas and then using my analytical and strategic skills to assess whether they would be feasible. I also found the thinking hats rather useful as a way to holistically evaluate whether we had covered all our bases in generating an idea and also as a way to assess whether our idea was a good one. As I mentioned before in a previous post, this course has allowed me to recognize that design thinking was very prevalent at my workplace and so I had real-life examples to draw on. I feel that my thinking process has become more in-depth and that I can add more value to any discussion whether it be at work or school. This course has definitely been one of the more memorable ones in my undergraduate degree and I will take the tools I have learned and apply it to any endeavor I embark on!