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Immersions courses allow for an in-depth, hands-on experience in an area of interest and are taught by industry experts and practioners. Each course runs 21 hours, from Sunday night (a one-hour introduction) to Friday morning.

Immersion choices include:

The Art of Innovation: Integrating Creativity in Organizations

Focus on Facilitation: de Bono Style

Leading Artfully: Finding Inspiration in the Commons of the Imagination

Polarity Management™:  Pathway to Sustainable Innovation

Theory of Constraints Tools - *Postponed until 2009*

the art of innovation: integrating creativity in organizations

Dimis Michaelides | David Magellan Horth
Developing creativity at both a personal and organizational level is a leadership imperative for survival in a world of accelerating change. However, the roadmap for achieving this is often either elusive, overwhelming or insufficient to deal with the complexities of the leader’s challenge in making creativity an integral part of their organization’s capabilities. 

Savvy leaders recognize that to make innovation thrive they need to orchestrate working on a number of different elements and at different levels of the organization at the same time. The essential elements are:

  • the Sources of efficient creativity (Talent, Energy, Method)
  • a Structure to drive innovation (Individual, Team, Target, System)
  • a Culture that makes creativity a potent force in an organizational context (Ideas, Engagement, Freedom, Humor, Risk)

This course introduces a set of elegant principles and invites ideas and actions to ensure these elements are developed to their full potential.  Participants will learn practical tools and techniques for applying these principles, thus enabling them to design and set up robust and innovative organizations.

During the workshop, participants will:

  • Develop a plan for enhancing their organization's capability for innovation;
  • Identify elements of sources, structure, and culture within their organization that promote or inhibit innovation;
  • Diagnose the challenges facing their organization's aspiration for innovation using 12 key elements;
  • Distinguish between “efficient teams” and “effective innovation teams” and develop a plan for promoting innovation teams;
  • Learn to analyze and intervene so as to enhance organizational innovation in different situations using the tools of a savvy innovation consultant;
  • Identify their own personal preferences within the innovation process and develop plans for leveraging them for effective innovation leadership.

Through interactive presentations, games, activities, assignments, the arts, music and magic, the workshop will transform the complexities of organizational innovation into concrete actionable challenges, and engage participants in the generation of solutions that reside within the realm of the possible.

Please note that each registered attendee will receive a copy of Dimis' book, The Art of Innovation: Integrating Creativity in Organizations.

focus on facilitation: de bono style

Natalie Jenkins | Mary Ellyn Vicksta

This workshop, based on thinking systems developed by Dr. Edward de Bono, is designed to equip you with the tools and frameworks needed to guide the groups you are leading or managing to systematically explore the topic at hand. 
If you are familiar with Dr. de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats and are looking for more this workshop is definitely for you.  This workshop has been acclaimed as the favorite by many of the top leaders within the Innova Training & Consulting network for the robust tool-set, application practice, and results focus.  If you are not familiar with Dr. Edward de Bono’s work, not to worry, you will learn the basics from 3 core de Bono thinking systems and receive a lot of application practice and coaching.


OBJECTIVES
Learn how to: 

  • Work with your clients (internal or external) to help them uncover and define the expected outcome and confirm it is important;

  • Design a flexible meeting plan to meet the client need;

  • Help your clients sort out their concerns and then determine which process/es will resolve them - ideation, problem solving, decision making, opportunity searching, etc. (Different concerns require different processes to resolve them);

  • Use powerful idea generating tools that will unlock the thinking of your group so they can generate fresh practical solutions;

  • Develop frameworks for rigorous idea evaluation linked to corporate objectives, strategy and customer needs;

  • Lead your client through a thorough business challenge to identify hidden opportunities to "out-think" the competition;

  • Add a structure to the front-end messiness of idea generation;

  • Keep your clients moving forward to a successful result;

  • Foster a meeting atmosphere that attendees will enjoy;

  • Use visual aids to stimulate attendees' thinking and map out a direction;

  • Leverage the diversity of thinking that leads to powerful solutions;

  • Get the best thinking a group has to offer by expanding and checking perception. 

 

 Bonus!  Hear about the newest methods developed for Value Assessment and Simplicity. 

leading artfully:  finding inspiration in the commons of the imagination

Michael Jones   www.pianoscapes.com  |  Anthony Hyatt | Teri O'Neill

In the future we need to envision a new leadership story – one that involves a transformation in awareness from performance to presence, from uniformity to uniqueness, from abstraction to beauty, from efficiency to improvisation and from instrumentality to the expressive power of story and voice. Together they awaken a commons of the imagination – a collective field of possibility that transforms our mechanistic view of the world to a more sustainable and transcendent vision that is creative, organic and whole.

The primary purpose of Leading Artfully is to explore these fundamental shifts in awareness in the context of cultivating an embodied mind that is more subtle, imaginative, and free-flowing in order to engage a complex and interconnected world.
As we struggle with new discontinuities and fragmentation, it is clear that we cannot apply the same strategies we used to create our known world in order to change it. Instead we will need to cultivate new disciplines of the imagination. The future will belong to those who understand the need for these new disciplines as the foundation for wisely navigating a larger unknown.  They recognize that this emerging story cannot be seen or planned objectively, but may be sensed and felt with an awakened and perceptive eye.

To cultivate this awakened eye we will need to develop leaders who are capable of: 

  • Leading from presence and uniqueness.
  • Leading from a balance of power and beauty.
  • Leading without a script.
  • Leading through the language of metaphor and story. 

Each of the four days in this immersion experience will explore one of these four pathways to the imagination. In so doing, participants will discover a new sense of faithfulness in their own life, their own way of uniquely seeing things, their own golden thread of meaning and possibility, and trust in the deep authority of their own subjective experience. Through the weaving of improvised musical performances, time in nature, guided processes and reflection, story, poetry, metaphoric movement and generative conversation, this program will offer a candle to those seeking to cultivate new habits of mind that may awaken the potential for personal and collective transformational leadership, learning and inspirational change.

 

Program Objectives and Outcomes

While participants can be assured of deriving multiple learnings from this course that are both deeply personal and practical, there is a set of core objectives and intended outcomes, that will be common for all. 

  • To better understand the relationship between personal transformation and collective leadership and how this synergy deepens the quality of collective engagement.

  • To master new and powerful habits of mind that align with the creative impulse and evoke the imagination as an active force in our lives.

  • To learn to be stewards of our own uniqueness and gifts so that we may help others connect with the roots of their our own aliveness and possibility. 

  • To awaken our own subtle perception through cultivating and embodying a sense of belonging and the beauty of place.

  • To experience the power of speaking our own story and finding our own authentic voice. 

  • To be sensitive for listening into the spaces between for detecting subtle meaning, emergent possibility and purposeful action.

  • To develop the wisdom to ask evocative questions and the patience to hold presence in face of uncertainty and a larger unknown.

  • To re-imagine our calling to be stewards of the commons as the blank canvas for connecting with fulfilling the collective possibilities in our own community or organization.

 

Please note that each registered attendee will receive a copy of Michael's latest book, Artful Leadership: Awakening the Commons of the Imagination, and CD.

Polarity management™ :  Pathway to Sustainable Innovation

Barry Johnson | Liz Monroe-Cook | Cliff Kayser | Beena Sharma – Polarity Management Associates

What if a whole class of issues exist that are inherently unsolvable regardless of the creativity of those addressing them?  Polarity Management™ practitioners assert that these types of issues do exist and seeing them as polarities to manage rather than problems to solve is highly useful. When a determination is made at the diagnosis stage that an issue is essentially a polarity to manage, all of the creative wisdom and experience normally brought to solving problems can be brought to managing these unsolvable problems called polarities.

Polarity Management™ is an analytical and practical approach that allows people to address the complexities of their situations, and to supplement either-or problem solving with both-and thinking.  Based on the work of Barry Johnson, Ph.D., author of Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems, and founder of Polarity Management Associates, this workshop will enable you to identify interdependent factors that are constantly present and indestructible, and address these polarities or interdependent pairs (or even multiple, intertwined factors) in your analysis, idea generation and planning..  As you begin to treat change in the context of a polarity to manage over time, you will increase the speed, attainability and sustainability of the changes you seek.  In addition, the workshop will offer you insights and experiences in merging Polarity Management and Creative Problem Solving in order to gain:  superior analysis of challenges or opportunities, incorporation of diverse viewpoints, extended applications of creative thinking, and sustainable innovations.  You will be able to apply these insights to personal and professional situations as you choose; the universality and flexibility of this model allow for a wide variety of applications.

The workshop leaders assume that many people have developed a tacit wisdom about managing polarities even if they have never heard the name.  Experience and intuition can lead to a natural ability to, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “…hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”  In this workshop you will strengthen that ability and learn to make this tacit wisdom explicit, to tap the power of opposing ideas and to create positive synergy from them. 

 

WORKSHOP ELEMENTS
During the workshop you will:  

  • Understand the background and context for Polarity Management – wisdom that appears across cultures and in many forms

  • Explore principles that explain the dynamics of how polarities actually work

  • Work with explicit guidelines for distinguishing problems to solve from polarities to manage

  • Learn how to use Polarity Maps™ for individual and organizational work, an important tool in this user-friendly model for seeing the structure of all polarities clearly and developing polarity related action plans

  • Learn from case examples from current Polarity Management practitioners

  • Work with your own examples individually and in supported groups

  • Become familiar with the applications of Polarity Management to Creative Problem Solving and vice versa.

  • Experience polarities in action through specific activities within the workshop

  • Learn specific applications of Polarity Management, e.g., helping groups manage conflict, strategic planning, values clarification, leadership development and assessment, organizational analysis and action planning, feedback processes.

Other objectives will be shaped by the situations and applications relevant to the participants in the workshop.  This workshop will have limited enrollment to ensure that sufficient time and support will be available for individual and small group learning.

Please note that each registered attendee will receive a copy of Barry's book, Polarity Management:  Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems.

 

REGISTER NOW!