Accelerating team performance

Sarah Thurber is an award-winning author, keynote speaker, and business leader who helps organizations unlock stronger performance through better thinking and collaboration. She is the Managing Partner at FourSight, where she leads a team translating decades of research in creative and critical problem solving into practical tools that help teams solve complex challenges faster.

FourSight has analyzed more than six million data points on cognitive diversity, supporting tens of thousands of teams worldwide in strengthening how they think, work, and decide together.

Sarah’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Fast Company, Forbes, and Inc. She holds a Master of Science in Creativity and Change Leadership and is the author of the award-winning book Good Team, Bad Team, recognized by Forbes as an essential resource for CEOs focused on building high-performing teams.

Founding partner, author and originator of the FourSight theory, Gerard has dedicated his career to bringing the best of creativity theory to the rest of us. Gerard J. Puccio is the department chair and professor at the International Center for Studies in Creativity, Buffalo State, a unique academic department that offers the world’s only MS degree in creativity.

In addition to creating the FourSight measure, Gerard has written more than fifty articles, chapters, and books. Along with his colleagues Marie Mance and Mary Murdock, he recently completed the second edition of a book titled Creative Leadership: Skills That Drive Change (2011). In recognition of his outstanding work as a scholar, Gerard received the State University of New York Chancellor’s Recognition Award for Research Excellence and the President’s Medal for Scholarship and Creativity. Gerard is an accomplished speaker, trainer, and consultant; he has worked with major corporations, universities, and numerous school districts in the United States and around the world. Some of the organizations Gerard has worked with recently include the British Broadcast Company (BBC), Paribas, Fisher-Price Brands, Rich Products, and Siemens. Gerard holds a PhD in organizational psychology from the University of Manchester, England.

Blair Miller, PhD, is cofounder of FourSight and President of Blair Miller Innovation. A public speaker, who specializes in large-scale innovation and creativity initiatives that help organizations enrich their creative climate and foster innovative solutions.

Blair’s earlier careers as a classroom teacher and an Outward-Bound instructor help him weave experiential components into his work. He has facilitated new-product development, strategic planning, and design to value initiatives at many Fortune 500 companies including Cadbury-Schweppes, Deloitte, DuPont, Intel, Invesco, Kraft, Mars, Monsanto, and Pfizer.

In addition to publishing the FourSight Thinking Profile and its suite of training materials, Blair has co-authored numerous books and publications, including Good Team Bad Team, Creativity Unbound: An Introduction to Creative Process, which is used in graduate programs in creativity and has been translated into several languages.

The Creative Education Foundation honored Blair with the Distinguished Leadership Award, noting his dedication to developing creative leaders in the field. And Buffalo State University awarded him the Alumni Achievement Award from the Center for Applied Imagination for his contributions to advancing the field of creativity.

Russ Schoen, Facilitation Lead at FourSight, certifies and mentors FourSight facilitators to help them build creativity, collaboration and innovation into their practices. Russ has worked as a facilitator and trainer in the areas of deliberate creativity, innovation and change leadership for more than 17 years and has delivered training programs worldwide including programs in Singapore, Italy, Australia, England, India, New Zealand, South Africa and the US. A sampling of clients include T. Rowe Price, International Flavor & Fragrances, Kraft, Coca-Cola, TAP Pharmaceuticals, SC Johnson, Philips Electronics, Praxair, Discover, Kimberly-Clark, Zimmer and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Russ’s practical field experience is backed up by his academic credentials. He holds a MS. in Creativity from SUNY college at Buffalo and is an adjunct faculty at the Center for Studies in Creativity where he has taught graduate courses in facilitating creative process since 2007. When not working, Russ spends his free time studying improv with his two toddlers.

As Customer Service Lead, Kelly strives to make sure you get the most out of your FourSight experience. When she helps you sort out your customer concerns, you’ll be glad she’s a Clarifier. Her degree in psychology was an excellent basis for starting her own accounting and business services company. That experience, along with her primary role as food purchaser and chauffeur to two teenagers, have given her excellent skills in multi-tasking, problem solving and patience.

Kelly loves working at FourSight, where she is just as likely to be speaking to a high level facilitator in Korea, a graduate student in Georgia or a business executive from the UK. Along with the teens, Kelly and her husband live in Evanston.

As Training Coordinator and Production Lead at FourSight, Christine Long supports FourSight training, certification and customer success. The FourSight team relies on her to keep office logistics running, FourSight U calendars clicking, and our inventory stocked. Her job is a nice fit with her “Analyst” profile, which lends itself to organizing and systematizing tasks in order to make things run more smoothly.

Christine’s natural preferences to clarify and develop have been enhanced by formal degrees in mathematics and education. Raising two children has given her a high tolerance for ideating and lots of practice implementing.