COVID-19

The onset, spread, control measures, and the behaviour of society, government, and businesses have far reaching implications—social, economic, and legal—for the immediate and future of employment relations and human resource management in Nigerian organisations. This chapter, drawing from available COVID-19 literature, ILO, and WHO protocols, examined various concerns and challenges posed by ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the regimes of measures which are modeled after developed economies of the world but are at best ad-hoc, panicky, ill-digested and their operations execution not based on empirical/objective assessment. COVID-19 has evidently brought job losses and unprecedented changes in work modes and some of the lessons and fallouts may live with us for a long time. Post-COVID-19 economic recovery though expected to be slow will leave the workplace and society with routines and rituals, lessons to learn and corrections to be made, not to avert future pandemics but to manage it in more precise manner with less panic and greater forthrightness.

Societal Shutdown and Reopening and Reclosing in the U.S. as Expressed in Social Imagery Narratives

In the COVID-19 pandemic era, political leaders have to navigate a difficult socio-political landscape balancing mass public health with socio-economic interests. They have to protect their susceptible populations and protect the social structures supporting their respective economies, healthcare systems, educational systems, international relationships, law and order, cultures and subcultures, national values, and others. A pandemic tends to disrupt systems and spark other social discontents among roiling publics. In May 2020, the U.S. started reopening from a mass lockdown involving a majority of its states, even as viral transmission rose. This work explores visual senses of societal shutdown, societal reopening, and societal (partial) reclosing in the U.S. in social imagery (all captured July 3, 2020, during the crisis) to better understand public responses to public health and other government interventions.

Collaborative Learning Strategy and Students' Academic Performance in Mathematics and Computer Programming

Humans are facing complex problems such as learning how to solve computational problems and academic failures. This research focused on the impact assessment of collaborative learning strategy on solving computational problems among students in Nigeria. A mixed research design was used and the population was 1600 senior secondary school students. A stratified random sampling method was used to select 240 SS III students for the study. The mathematics and computer programming performance tests instrument for data collection were validated by experts in educational measurement and evaluation. A reliability coefficient of 0.79 was obtained for the test instrument. The data collected were analysed using mean, standard deviations and multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) statistical tools. Findings revealed that the use of collaborative learning strategy was effective on student's academic performance in solving mathematical and programmatically based problems. Recommendations on students' learning activities were suggested for the enhancement of students' learning experiences.

Leading Creative Problem Solving

This chapter explores the potential of mindfulness as a tool to assist us to think creatively when attempting to solve a problem. The study was conducted within an organisational setting and aimed to explore the impact of a mindfulness intervention on the creativity of leaders. A mixed methods research strategy was implemented, and an intrinsic case study employed in the study. The sample consisted of fourteen leaders of an organisation within the South African ICT industry. The data was collected using interviews, MAAS (mindfulness awareness attention scale) questionnaires, alternate uses tasks, and a creative problem-solving exercise. The findings highlighted that exposure to a brief mindfulness intervention seems to have positively impacted the dispositional mindfulness of leaders, as well as appear to have positively impacted their ability to creatively solve a problem. Participants highlighted the notion of pausing, reflecting, and resetting when dealing with daily challenges, which resulted in the PRR model being constructed.

Problem-Oriented Technology Innovation and Participatory Technology Assessment in China

China is developing an ‘innovation-oriented nation' and meanwhile meeting challenges in both innovation practice and research. This chapter contributes to the book that introduces a problem-oriented approach to develop innovation research to a Chinese context that responses to the increasing challenges. Three questions will be focused on: 1) What are the main problems and challenges of innovation and research in China to become a front runner in the knowledge economy? 2) What is a problem-oriented innovation approach? and 3) How does it conceptualize the China's innovation challenge? Briefly, this chapter deepens the understanding of a new conceptual framework of a problem-oriented approach to innovation research and suggests new methods of technology assessment to China. It also provides implications for researchers in other cultural contexts around the world.

Visual Stories of COVID-19 Social-Physical Distancing From Tagged Social Imagery

“Social distancing,” combined with self-quarantining and self-isolating, are some of the few initial defensive stances for naïve humanity against a highly transmissible and contagious lethal pathogen, until more high-powered medical science-based interventions (therapeutics, vaccines) are available. “Social distancing” refers to various approaches: the physical distancing of people from each other, the wearing of face masks in public, the washing of hands to avoid contaminants from others' microbes, and others. On social media, social imagery labeled “social distancing” (by both folk tagging and automated machine tagging) may be studied to better understand the surprise of transitioning from modern hypersociality (oversharing, high connectance, lessened senses of personal privacy) to sudden social-physical distancing with only the mitigations of electronic connectivity. This work takes a systematized manual analysis of social imagery to better understand social-physical distancing in a present-day pandemic.

Creative Accelerated Problem Solving (CAPS) for Advancing Business Performance

Businesses are automated, complex, unpredictable, operating in a global marketplace with limited collective creative problem-solving intelligence for advancing performance. This chapter explores how business advance and succeed, by maximising individual creativity and problem-solving abilities. Literature reviewed in the last two decades revealed the latest evolving business trends, allowing for compared human versus automation performance, compared ROI and risk of innovative business factors, compared business beneficiary intelligence to consciousness levels, and correlated co-creative intelligence elements of psychomotor, cognitive and affective intelligences to engagement, awareness, and changed behaviour skills. A CAPS model is a management cascaded solution for co-creating business intelligence by enhancing individual creativity using these 15 elements: consciousness, know yourself, brain knowledge, imagination, problem solving, creative thinking, speed reading, mind maps, mind management, memory skills, responsibility, goal setting, stress, success, and accelerated learning.

Evaluating Collective and Creative Problem-Solving Approaches and Tools for Wicked Problems

Societies and businesses are faced with problems that contain too many new, unknown, and unintended consequences and even more so as humans have to face and deal with more complexity created by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. These problems have become ‘wicked problems'. Creativity is needed to solve problems as it allows people to create new ideas by using their mental toolkit, creative characteristics and behaviours. It is possible to solve wicked problems using collective and creative problem-solving approaches and tools. This means that people need to work together to generate creative ideas to find novel and breakthrough solutions. To try and find a “silver bullet” to solve wicked problems, various problem-solving approaches and tools were evaluated and it became evident that a combination of approaches supported by various tools might lead to solving wicked problems collectively and creatively.

Using Creativity, Diversity, and Iterative Ways of Working to Send the Virus to Lockdown

The novel Covid-19 causing virus has caused major disruptions to individuals, societies, and economies worldwide. No single country has been left unaffected, and many societies have taken severe measures, including complete lockdowns of huge metropolitan areas, to limit the further spread of the virus. As a result, international trade and traveling have virtually come to a halt, enterprises struggle to survive, and both individuals and entire societies face an uncertain future. The Covid-19 pandemic thus represents a wild-card event that disrupts predictions of future developments and confronts researchers, policymakers, and decision-makers in organisations with a wicked problem. This chapter proposes that lateral collaboration, shorter iteration loops, and diversity will enable organisations to cope with future wild cards more effectively. Applying the same principles to research bears the potential to generate creative solutions to the wicked problem of pandemic disease control faster.

Can Community Education Promote Community Participation in the Local Economic Development (LED) Activities in this Era of 2019-nCoV

The 2019-nCoV has come as an unexpected wicked challenge especially to the vulnerable ones as it has significantly affected the local economic development (LED) activities of many local people in communities of South Africa. In this chapter, the role of community education as a problem-solving measure in promoting community participation in LED will be explored as limited participation in those activities prevail especially in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic. The study provides the challenges posed by the limited participation in the communities and the economy and explains how the local participation is important through community education (CE) programmes in LED activities. Since community education indeed plays a huge role in enhancing community participation in LED activities, the government officials, policymakers and others need to work closely with local people so that they can understand the essence of socio-economic issues that communities daily encounter in the wake of the pandemic.