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Syllabus: Specific Topics and Areas of Study
- Just In Time (JIT) Hands-on-tools Approach Get direct experience and hands-on practice with creative techniques and tools by working with real clients on tough, real-world issues and problems on a JIT basis - learn it when you need it and immediately apply what you've learned in practice.
- Ideation Become comfortable with and skilled at the facilitating and guiding small groups and meetings; standing up and leading a group through idea-finding and idea-generating sessions.
- Levels of Change Become fully comfortable with how to use the seven basic levels of change as a model for connecting creativity and innovation with continuous improvement and quality. Learn how to facilitate the change process across the spectrum from level 1 (Doing Things Right) to breakthrough thinking at level 7 (Doing Things That Can't Be Done).
- Thinking about Thinking In connection with understanding your own creative style and risk orientation, you'll continuously be thinking about the way you think - as well as the way you don't think and how to move around and over your own mental blocks, filters and paradigms (ShiftThink).
- Creative Problem Solving (CPS) Move from simple creative tools and techniques to your own model for facilitating all stages of creative problem solving: mess-finding, problem-finding, data-finding, idea-finding, solution-finding, acceptance-finding and action-planning.
- Diffferent Meetings Be able to plan, coordinate and facilitate any meeting or conference so that agendas are energized with innovative thinking. Learn how to refocus (on-the-spot) any meeting towards creative solutions and action - on a "low tech" basis with a 5-Minute Meeting.
- Jumpstarting and Energizing Ideas Learn how to rapidly expand and develop an idea into an overall concept built around a creative implementation action plan. Learn how to move an idea to social acceptance - how to build a network of support for an idea - and how to launch it.
- Creativity Techniques Learn how to use a variety of techniques to generate more creativity in yourself and your organization, how to move people toward thinking and looking at things differently.
- Creative Style and Type Get to know yourself diffferently. How you listen and you speak, how you take in and connect with information, how you decide things, and how you approach life. Take stock of your strengths, weaknesses and particular style of looking at a problem - and similarly, learn how to compare and leverage creative styles within small and large groups. Learn how to THINK... better, differently and more creatively - when and how to diverge and when and how to converge in the creative problem solving process.
- Colorado Mountain School Learn how to transfer and integrate creative thinking challenges and experiences outdoors into leading small groups and facilitating team-building. Discover how Learning the Ropes and rock climbing can sharpen your own edge and push your risk-taking boundaries, teaching how to think faster on your feet at every level of change and challenge, and then apply these skills to facilitating small groups and teams.
- Lateral Thinking Excursions Learn how to lead a group into new thinking directions with visual connection techniques, and the use of video clips as spring-boards. Advanced facilitation processes involving pictures and color are used to get groups "unstuck" on the really tough problems by tapping the hidden Picasso in people - their artistic side - in excursions away from the obvious.
- Thinking Guide's Fieldbook Each School for Innovators develops and adds new insights, techniques, tips and tools to the Fieldbook for Thinking Expeditions - the Thinking Guide's handbook that complements the Innovators Toolbox - and leaves with a copy.
- Innovator's Toolbox Leave the School with a creative thinking journal and tool kit full of ideas and techniques for facilitating change at every level of the Quality and Innovation processes.