A Mindful Approach to Team Creativity and Collaboration in Organizations

"The perfect book for leaders interested in integrating mindfulness and contemplative arts into the structure of their organizations. Dr. Rothouse's experience as a musician and long-time meditator gives her approach a deeply authentic quality that can inspire cohesion and collaboration in teams."

- Steven Pritzker, Co-Editor-in-Chief of The Encyclopedia of Creativity

"This book is an essential addition to the rapidly growing field of organizational creativity. ... it will be immensely valuable to scholars and organizational leaders alike, enabling leaders, coaches, and facilitators to build a culture of collaboration and innovation within their teams."

- Scott Barry Kaufman, author of Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization

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.

Melinda J. Rothouse is a leadership and creativity coach, consultant, educator, and facilitator based in Texas, USA. She helps individuals and organizations tap into their innate creativity for greater insight, collaboration, and innovation. She is also a musician and photographer, and leads workshops and retreats on mindfulness and creativity.