Engage your employees in new ways of thinking with these inspiring talks on Creativity, Leadership, Resilience, Art & Design Thinking

These highly visual, interactive talks are designed to inform, inspire and ignite creative thinking in your employees. Each talk is customized for your group and provides new insights and practical tips to enhance collaborative leadership, teamwork, and creativity in the workplace.

Talks are 1-2 hours in length and are delivered via Zoom.

Building creative resilience

In the face of tumultuous change and disruption thanks to the pandemic, we’ve all been challenged to find our resilience and enhance our ability to cope with challenges. This workshop features activities from the world of theatre improv to help your team lighten up, have some fun, increase camaraderie and along the way learn a few gems about creativity and resilience.

Learning outcomes:

  • How Theatre Improv creates a psychologically safe space for people to explore creativity
  • The role of play in design thinking, creativity, and innovation
  • Brain juicers and icebreakers that add fun and energy to teamwork

Seven habits of highly creative innovators

Your ability to generate innovative ideas is not merely a function of your mind but also habits and behaviours. How do you enhance creativity and bring the best out of your team? This module will teach you how you and your team can be as innovative and impactful as the most creative people in business – if you change your behaviours. The seven habits are based in part on the five discovery skills of “The Innovator’s DNA.” You will leave with impactful insights and practical tips to boost your creativity, foster innovation and prepare for a successful future.

Learning outcomes

  • Understand the key discovery skills of disruptive innovators in business, art, technology and science.
  • Real-world examples from highly creative innovators
  • Introduce practical tools and techniques you and your team can use on the job

Influencing for impact

Why is Impact and Influence Important? “Leadership is the activity of influencing people to cooperate towards some goal which they come to find desirable and which motivates them over the long haul.”— Ordway Tead, author of The Art of Influence (1935)

The success of your project—and the course of your career—depends on your ability to influence people to get things done. This highly interactive workshop provides an overview of developing influence, power and impact (drawn from research and executive coaching frameworks) to help you have more impact as a leader and manager. Participants also explore spheres of influence through imagery and stories.

Learning outcomes

  • Learn how to get buy-in for your ideas
  • Learn how to exercise the power and influence you need to get things done through others even when your responsibilities exceed your formal authority.
  • Identify specific challenges facing your group and explore how these might be resolved via influencing for impact

What can art teach business leaders?

Artists and business leaders have many parallels. Both involve having a guiding vision, a potent point of view, formulating an ideal, navigating chaos and the unknown, and finally producing a new creation. An artful leader must know how to lead people creatively. Since all great art pushes boundaries beyond established norms, it can teach us about leadership, empathy, ambiguity, change, courage, and creativity. It makes sense to explore what we can learn from the world of arts and apply it to business: We will use art as a catalyst for creative conversations about the future, culture, leadership or any topic of importance to your group.

Activating your visual intelligence

Visual Intelligence includes the ability to observe the world around us, see patterns, make connections, decipher complexity and make meaning. Art teaches us to see. Images communicate more powerfully than words and have a language of their own. They are inherently rich in metaphor and symbolism. As a Chinese proverb points out, “Hearing something 100 times, is not the same as seeing it once.”

  • Learn practical ways to enhance your discovery skills for innovation by developing visual intelligence, observational skills, and critical thinking.
  • Visualizing information helps us see patterns, make connections, think metaphorically, decipher complexity, discern emerging futures and create shared visions amongst diverse groups. Developing your observation skills along with critical thinking will help you and your team find new insights for creativity and innovation.

Art and Design Thinking: how it applies to leadership, creativity and innovation

Creativity is a core competency for leaders and managers, and a crucial component of the innovation equation. Linda Naiman will provide a brief overview of key concepts of creativity, then guide you through experiential arts-based activities to help you develop skills in ideation, integrative thinking and design. Leave this session with ideas, insights and techniques, which you can apply to your work.

Topics:

  • What can leaders learn from artists?
  • What role can art play to shape a culture of creativity and innovation
  • Group discussion and activities involving art and design principles

Design Thinking: A strategy for innovation

This webinar will introduce Design Thinking frameworks and take you step by step through the process to give you a basic understanding of the way it works and how you can integrate Design Thinking in your coaching. Design thinking offers a structured framework for understanding and pursuing innovation in ways that contribute to organic growth and add real value to your customers.