Creativity and Collaboration in Practice: Essential Skills for the 21st Century Practitioner

Creativity, innovation and the ability to work with others are three essential skills for success in the increasingly settlement-oriented conflict culture of the 21st century. To build and enhance these skills, this course takes an interdisciplinary arts-based approach to advocacy, negotiation and problem-solving. Using music- and arts-based exercises, students will expand their thinking and approaches to problem-solving, conflict management and dispute resolution beyond the limited rational-logical considerations of traditional legal analysis. Students will learn skills and methods to explore creative analysis of conflict and the efficacy of moving beyond adversarial, competitive and contentious approaches to employ more cooperative, collaborative “ensemble” approaches to dispute resolution. Empirical research and leading literature suggests that engagement with the arts reconnects people to their creative potential and leads them to see the efficacy of employing creative thinking in professional environments where analytical and critical thinking have generally been over-emphasized. Experiences with collaborative approaches to conflict have the potential to shift traditional norms and behaviours. Research has shown that artistic ways of thinking and being can enhance performance and lead to more desirable outcomes in practice. As Daniel Pink states, “the ‘left brain’ capabilities that powered the Information Age are necessary but no longer sufficient…the ‘right brain’ qualities of inventiveness, empathy, joyfulness, and meaning increasingly will determine who flourishes and who flounders.” This course encourages students to take radically different approaches to litigation, mediation, negotiation and settlement resolution in their professional lives. It asks student to re-examine fundamental questions related to who we are, what we do and how we do it as conflict resolution practitioners. This course will be an attractive option for students within the Dispute Resolution specialization as well as those outside the specialization who are litigators or those who regularly participate in dispute resolution such as mediations and negotiations.