About This Intelligence Community Online Course

What is creativity? Creativity is an ability or the aptitude to imagine or invent something new. Creativity is an attitude. Creative people accept change and newness and are open to new ideas and possibilities. Creativity is a process. Creative people work hard to continually improve ideas and solutions.

Most intelligence analysts do not utilize the power of creative thinking in their day-to-day work. However, maximizing creativity in the thinking process effectively forces intelligence analysts to go outside their comfortable analytic mindsets and suspend their typical judgments about the practicality of ideas or approaches. This can lead to new hypotheses to explore and evidence to gather—improving the quality of analysis of any intelligence problem.

A variety of creative thinking techniques exist. In this course, you will be exposed to two fundamental creative thinking techniques: brainstorming and outside-in thinking. In three lessons, you will gain new knowledge about the importance and use of creative thinking in intelligence analysis and work on several exercises using a real-world case study to practice applying creative thinking techniques to an intelligence problem.

What You Will Learn

• Define what creative thinking is
• Apply the brainstorming process
• Apply the outside-in-thinking process

Your Instructor

This course was developed by Dr. J. Keith Dunbar. Dr. Dunbar is the founder and chief executive officer of FedLearn.

He is a former naval intelligence officer whose career culminated with a tour of duty as the director of the Global Learning Solutions Group and the Leadership Academy, Academy for Defense Intelligence, at the Defense Intelligence Agency. After retiring from the U.S. Navy, Dr. Dunbar led the learning and talent development organizations at two large government contractor companies, SAIC and Leidos.

He received his Doctorate in Education from the University of Pennsylvania (in a partnership with the Wharton Business School) and his Master of Science in strategic intelligence from the National Intelligence University.

Who Should Take This Online Course

This online course is perfect for any professional interested in improving his/her/their creative thinking skills—particularly, intelligence analysts working for either Federal government agencies or government contractor companies.

Prerequisites

None

Course Certificate

To achieve a course certificate of completion, you must score 80 percent or higher on graded lesson quizzes and a final exam.

Course Format

Self-paced, online training course

Course Pricing

Individual courses are $49 (per person).

Seat licenses to access the entire FedLearn Intelligence Community catalog are also available. Click here to learn more and purchase

If you are interested in learning about special team rates for Federal government and government contractor organizations, email [email protected]

Continuing Education Unit Credits

This course provides 2 CEUs.