CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION TRAINING
Live, In-Person Group Workshops and Individual Online Training
Most of us didn’t learn innovation in school or the usual management training programs. We need a training experience that is lean, engaging, and impactful. Leaders need to develop their innovative leadership skills and respond to the challenges that are always emerging. Dozens of clients call on us when they want to strengthen their organizational culture of innovation and foster collaboration. Many times they have a special innovation initiative, event, or program they need expertise in kicking off.
Creativity and Innovation Training Options
We offer a range of creativity and innovation training for organizations, groups, and individuals. Please email Darin with more information about your needs and we can share directions to consider that could range from:
- Interactive keynote speech for a special event
- Engaging innovation training workshops
- Intensive innovation culture retreats for organizations
- Collaborative innovative facilitation courses for leaders
- Brainstorming sessions for groups
- Any of our online innovation training programs
What Creativity Training Builds
Creative thinking gets treated as a personality trait far more often than it gets treated as a skill set. In our experience it behaves like a skill set. People generate better ideas when they have a method to follow, a group that builds on their thinking, and enough practice to trust the process when the stakes are real.
Framing the challenge
Turn a vague frustration into a challenge statement a group can actually work on. Most weak ideas trace back to a poorly framed question.
Generating volume before judgment
Separate idea generation from idea evaluation. This is the single habit that changes how a brainstorm feels and what it produces.
Building on other people’s thinking
The best idea in a session is usually the third version of someone else’s half-formed suggestion. That takes a facilitated structure rather than goodwill.
Making ideas tangible fast
Sketch, storyboard, and rough prototype so a conversation moves from opinion to something the group can react to.
Deciding what to carry forward
Sessions that generate a hundred sticky notes and no decisions teach people to distrust creative work. We build the selection step into the session.
Creativity Training Formats
Interactive Keynote
Participants do real creative work in 45 to 90 minutes rather than watch slides about creativity. Designed for conferences and all-hands events.
Half-Day Creativity Workshop
Run a full ideation cycle on a real challenge and leave with concepts worth developing further. If your focus is specifically on solving a defined problem, see our creative problem solving workshop.
Full-Day or Multi-Day Creative Thinking Program
Add prototyping, testing, and the selection work that turns a pile of ideas into something a team can act on.
Creative Culture Retreat
For leadership groups working on how the organization treats new ideas, not only on generating them. Often delivered as an offsite designed around your place and people.
Virtual Creativity Sessions
Run on collaborative whiteboards so remote and hybrid groups get the same build-on-each-other dynamic as a room with wall space.
Facilitator Development
For people who need to lead this work themselves, through our facilitation workshop or the design thinking innovation train the trainer program.
Combining Creativity Training with Other Sessions
Some groups want creativity training on its own. Others build it into a longer program. If you are weighing it against a related session, these are the ones it most often sits beside:
The Creative Problem Solving Process
A structured process for working a defined problem through to tested solutions, with techniques training and a creative problem solving workshop available around it.
Structure and Strategy for Brainstorming
A step-by-step system of activities you can use on your own challenge to run more effective brainstorming sessions.
Innovate with Teams
Skills and tools to help your teams create and develop ideas more effectively against a challenge you bring.
Design Thinking Training and Workshops
Learn the process, tools, and techniques of design thinking to generate and validate ideas with and for the people you serve.
How We Design Your Creativity Training
We do not run the same agenda for every client. The design starts with a conversation about who is in the room, what they are under pressure to deliver, and what would count as a good outcome for the person sponsoring the session. A creative thinking workshop for an R&D group looks different from one for a marketing team or a group of school principals, and it should.
A few questions shape most of the design work. Is this about building individual creative confidence, or about how the group works together? Is there a real challenge on the table the session should make progress on? What has this group already been through, since teams that have sat through a disappointing innovation initiative need a different opening than teams new to it? And what happens the day after, because a session connected to live work produces very different energy than one that ends at the door.
When someone else is the better fit
We get more inquiries than we take. When a request is for a very specific approach someone else knows better, or when it is in a country where a local facilitator will serve you better, we say so and point you toward a person or firm we recommend. Most people reaching out are not looking for us specifically. They have a workshop to put on or a team to train, and they want that done well. Sending you to the right person is part of doing that.
Who Creativity Training Is For
Most groups we work with are not creative departments. They are leadership teams, product and engineering groups, HR and L&D teams, university staff, healthcare and nonprofit organizations, and associations running a conference session. The common thread is a group facing a problem their usual process has not solved, and a sponsor who suspects the answer will come from the people already in the building.
Questions We Get About Creativity Training
Can creativity really be taught?
The methods can be taught, and the methods do most of the work. Groups that practice structured ideation reliably produce more ideas and better ideas than the same groups working without a method. What training changes fastest is not raw creative talent but how willing people are to offer an unfinished thought.
How large a group can you work with?
We have run creativity training sessions for small leadership teams and for conference rooms of several hundred people organized into small tables. Large groups need more structure and more attention to how activities are set up, which is a design question rather than a limit.
Do you need a real challenge to work on?
It helps a great deal. Sessions built around a live organizational challenge hold attention better and give leadership something to act on. When a real challenge is not available we use a well-chosen practice challenge, which still builds the skill.