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Workshops

Creativity and Innovation: Unlock Your Creative Genius

A three-module program for teams who need fresh thinking on hard problems and a way of working they can repeat. Your people learn the tools, use them on challenges your organization is facing now, then come back to present what they found.
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Who it suits

Leadership and project teams facing a problem that isn’t well defined, where everyone has an opinion and nobody has a way to test them. It works best when the decision has to be defensible and the problem is likely to come up again.

What your team leaves with

Progress on a live business problem, a shared language for running creative sessions, and a copy of Your Creativity Toolkit for each participant to keep using after the workshop.

The three modules

Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver
1

Discover and define

Find the right problem

Reframing, the 7Ws and Five Whys to turn a vague issue into a problem statement the whole team agrees on.
2

Develop

Generate better options

Divergent tools such as Borrowing Brilliance, SCAMPER and Silent Brainstorming, with judgment held back until the options are on the table.
3

Deliver

Choose and stress-test

Selection tools like the Decision Matrix, then a Premortem or Red Teaming before resources are committed.

Case study

Birchcliff Energy Ltd.

Birchcliff Energy Ltd. asked me to run a Creativity and Innovation workshop for a cross-functional group from operations, engineering, and geology and geophysics, joined by people from marketing, finance and the senior leadership team. Just over 50 people took part, working in ten teams.

The leadership team supplied a set of problems the company was facing that would make a difference if solved. Some were operational, such as getting more out of well design and completions at lower cost, or speeding up field maintenance without adding to it. Others were about how the organization works, like moving good practice from one field to the next more reliably and easing the hand-offs between departments. Each team chose the problem most relevant to its own work, and a member of the leadership team was appointed as owner of each problem. The owners were available to the teams during the elicitation stage and for questions as the work went on.

The workshop ran in three parts. The first day, Upping Your Creative Game, covered the thinking behind creativity and innovation and introduced the tools, with plenty of interaction. Before the teams were formed, everyone completed a short personality profile, which helped balance each team between divergent and convergent thinkers. On the second day, the Innovation Challenge, the teams worked their problems through. They defined them with elicitation techniques, generated ideas with brainstorming, SCAMPER and Six Thinking Hats, then selected and refined them with a Decision Matrix, MoSCoW and Red Teaming.

After a period of incubation, the teams reconvened to finalize their work, picking up any new ideas that had surfaced in the meantime. In a third session, held online, each team presented its conclusions and recommended solutions to the management team.

Theo had said at the start that a good outcome would be tangible ideas or concepts the company could run with. Afterwards he told me, “Our team presented a few interesting ideas and I suspect there will be others, which is great.”

“The follow-up stage was particularly useful. Participants had time to absorb the material and refine how they used the tools on those same challenges, before coming back to present their outcomes to the group.”
Theo van der Werken, Chief Operating Officer, Birchcliff Energy Ltd.

Formats

Run in person or online, for groups of 5 to 60, with multiple sittings for larger organizations. Each format can be shaped around a specific challenge your organization is facing. Pricing depends on the format and group size, so book a call and I’ll put together a proposal.

Half-day introduction

A hands-on introduction to a handful of tools, applied to one team challenge.

Full-day workshop

The core of all three modules in one day, working from problem definition through to a chosen direction.

Most complete

Full program

All three modules over several sessions, with a follow-up where teams present their outcomes to the group.

Start with a conversation

Tell me a little about your team and the challenge. I’ll come back to you to set up a 20-minute call, and we’ll work out whether a workshop is the right fit.
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