Turning Adversity into Opportunity
By Dana Sendziol, Ph.D.
Director of the DBA Program at Concordia University Wisconsin/Ann Arbor.png)
At the most recent Creative Problem Solving Institute Conference in Buffalo, researchers Tim Basadur and Dana Sendziol, PhD led participants through an experiential workshop of discovery into how resiliency and creative problem solving go together in turning adversity into opportunity. The characteristics of creative and resilient individuals – initiative, adaptability, inventive problem solving, and proactive preparation for future challenges – represent more than half of the top 15 most important job skills (World Economic Forum, 2020).
The global coronavirus pandemic and resulting changes in the workforce has only made the need for resilience and creativity more acute (Accenture, 2021; Microsoft, 2021). Gallup’s 2021 State of the Global Workplace report emphasized the importance of the need for corporations to have employees who are highly innovative, agile and resilient. A 2020 report from the ADP Research Institute global workplace survey revealed that just 15 percent of workers could be categorized as highly resilient and defined workplace resilience as “the capacity of an individual to withstand, bounce back from, and work through challenging circumstances or events at work (p. 4).” In fact, creativity has been found to be an outcome of more resilient employees (Shin, Taylor & Seo, 2012), as well as a key contributor to employees’ having the resilience they need to persist in producing quality work in adverse situations (Parker, Bindl, & Strauss, 2010).
The Resilience Alliance and Basadur Applied Innovation recommend these tips for increasing resilience with creativity:
- Increase your creative thinking by moving from “either/or” thinking, which tends to polarize ideas, to “both/and” thinking, which helps open up a range of options, connections, and possibilities.
- Recognize your strengths as a problem solver as well as specifically define the problem being solved. For instance, there are emotional and physical components attached to problems and challenges. By pinpointing the emotional and physical aspects of the problem, one is able to see and define the problem more objectively, which opens the mind to different solutions.
- Defer judgment when considering sources of stress and adversity at work in order to fully consider your situation objective and creatively.
- Take a step-by-step approach to addressing adversity. Start by open-mindedly examining your situation to uncover facts about it that can enable you to redefine it in more advantageous terms, then use your creativity (and the creativity of others) to brainstorm and choose viable solutions that you can confidently begin putting into action.
Finally, acknowledge that the ‘new’ normal is a reality which all of us are collectively living through and that there is relief in knowing that adversity can be overcome if we approach it using a systematic creative process. If you are willing to consider – and reconsider – how you have defined your situation, you will then find out that there are actually some potentially attractive ways you can move forward which enable you to thrive rather than just survive.
Dana Sendziol, PhD, serves as Director of the DBA Program at Concordia University Wisconsin/Ann Arbor and is a certified personal resilience practitioner (PRP) through the Resilience Alliance. Tim Basadur, MBA serves as Primary Researcher and Facilitator for Basadur Applied Innovation. For more information on the DBA program, visit www.cuw.edu.
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