Two years after training, the organization could still measure the positive impact.

In 2013, Brett Richards, PhD wanted to test his new culture survey, which measured an organization’s growth potential. He found willing participants at Sheridan College, one of Canada's largest colleges. Nearly a hundred administrators and faculty members took his culture survey.

Two years later, he returned to Sheridan and ran a retest.

He was shocked.

The organization's scores had improved—showing increases like nothing he had seen before.

The organization had gone up on nearly every scale—particularly in the areas of strategic, innovative, collaborative, and creative mindsets. 

What had caused it?

Richards started to dig. Unbeknownst to him, in the two years between surveys, Sheridan had hosted a series of FourSight-based, creative problem solving workshops. Hundreds of faculty and administrators had participated.

Could a few training courses have such a big an impact on an organization’s potential for growth? Richards had to find out. He got the names of survey participants who had participated in the training and re-ran the numbers, looking only at their results.

"The results were just unbelievable,” said Richards.

The trainees accounted for the entire gain in scores. People without the training showed no improvement.

“That was truly a significant finding,” he said.

Richards, a man who specializes in identifying drivers of organizational growth, had stumbled upon hard evidence that FourSight-based training in creative problem solving not only increases an organization's ability to create and collaborate—it increases an organization's ability to grow.

Based on interviews with Brett Richards, PhD, founder of Connective Intelligence Inc. and developer of the Organizational Growth Index (OGI™). Read the full research study, published in The International Journal of Creativity & Problem Solving, 2017, 27(2), 35-52.