Incorporating hard boxes and soft bubbles into the dietetics curriculum

Dietitians have been challenged to learn the skills of creative thinking in order to become proficient managers in a rapidly changing world. We reviewed the literature to determine the prerequisites of creative thinking and assessed the management and administrative dietetics curriculum for our dietetic internship to determine whether those prerequisites were being met. A major concern in the dietetics profession is that students are not being adequately prepared to assume top management positions. A review of business school curriculums reveals that an emphasis on management theory and quantitative analysis does not adequately prepare students to function effectively in a world where creative problem solving is required. Effective managers at high levels of responsibility rely on intuition and hunches in addition to logical thought processes. Two thinking models are employed by managers--a rational one (hard box) and an intuitive one (soft bubble). These thinking models, or cognitive styles, can also be defined as left and right brain skills. Effective managers use left and right brain skills plus a combination of the two, or integrative brain skill. We reviewed the competencies, behavioral objectives, and planned experiences for the management level rotations of our dietetic internship to develop a conceptual model for the use of right, left, or integrative thought processes. We discovered that although integrative brain skills are used at all levels of our management rotations, especially the top management rotation, no rotation exclusively fosters right-brain skill development. A dietetic internship offers a fertile environment for developing the creative problem-solving skills that are required in management positions in the health care profession today.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)