Inviting people to solve problems with a creative lens to build innovative solutions requires creating inspiring environment, aligning their teams on “what is” and “what needs to be”, having them put their ideas into action rather than discussion and generating collective learning through self and team reflection.

The CAPS model is born out of my experience facilitating more than 200 workshops for problem solving and generating innovative ideas in different healthcare settings with clinical, non-clinical and cross-functional teams. These workshops have ranged in focus from creating group alignment, process improvement, to ideation and prototyping and guiding leaders though culture change.

The model described below is grounded in the principles of Design Thinking, Theory U and Action Learning concepts and is inspired from my work at Advent Health Innovation in Orlando under Dr. Karen Tilstra’s tutelage.

The foundation for this work began in collaboration with Dr. Simone Orlowski in the summer of 2017 and since then has been supported by and further developed in collaboration with Dr. Amanda Centi, Sunetra Bane, and Dr. Kamal Jethwani, along with generous mentorship from Dr. Cheryl Clark.

One of the mindsets that guide these workshops is ‘Accept Feedback as a Gift’: in that spirit, I want to put this initial draft of the CAPS model out there for discussion, debate and development. Through soliciting feedback, I aim to deepen the model and make it applicable across teams in public or private sectors, with the mission of disrupting people and increasing individual agency to create the change they need.

As I define this model in detail, I will also start including results from our research into the hypothesis in the facts and figures section – “Workshops conducted using the CAPS model increase creative agency among participants”. We have used interviews, observations and a validated survey for measuring creative agency for our research.