SPA Conference session: Brainstorming Considered Harmful: Effective Coaching for Creativity and Innovation | |||
One-line description: | Exploring ideas and techniques around group creativity to energize self-organizing teams | ||
Session format: | Workshop (150 mins) [read about the different session types] | ||
Abstract: | Coaching often focusses on performance, or effectiveness, or on educating teams and individuals in particular tools, techniques and processes. We think Innovation is a missing piece of the puzzle. Innovation is not just about creating exciting new product concepts, feature definitions and business ideas. We use our innovation muscles every time we solve a problem in technology, design, collaboration, process. A team with innovation at its core is willing to learn, to create new ways of working individually, as a team, and with other groups, and to respond to changes in its social, technical and organisational environment. We believe this level of group creativity is essential to effective self-organization: without it energy flags and practices become stale, particularly as often we fall back on a limited and unhelpful set of tools for fostering innovation. There are many better ways of facilitating creativity than the "Brainstorming Session". The workshop will * explore the role of creativity in the day-to-day work of teams * motivate the exercises by reviewing some of the research in innovation and group creativity * provide an opportunity to try a number of coaching and workshop techniques for enhancing innovation * invite participants to provide scenarios from their own experience with which to explore these techniques | ||
Audience background: | The session is suitable for anyone wanting to improve the creativity of the teams in which they work. | ||
Benefits of participating: | * Develop innovation thinking as a core approach to working in teams * Learn new and novel ways of helping teams to shift perspective * Apply some of the latest thinking in motivation and group creativity to your team or coaching work | ||
Materials provided: | Props, cards, objects in support of the exercises | ||
Process: | The workshop will be mainly experiential, with emphasis on practical, hands-on activities applied to real scenarios. These will be supported by brief presentations of research on innovation, creativity and motivation. | ||
Detailed timetable: | 00:00 - 00:10 warm-up exercise 00:10 - 00:25 group creativity 00:25 - 01:15 exploration of techniques == break == 01:15 - 01:30 generation of scenarios 01:30 - 02:00 three rounds of innovation exercises around the scenarios 02:00 - 02:30 review, presentation, reflection | ||
Outputs: | Summaries of innovation narratives developed around the scenarios identified and workshopped by the participants, on the SPA wiki | ||
History: | The session draws on material developed and presented in coaching workshops and innovation training for several organisations. | ||
Presenters | |||
1. David Harvey Teams and Technology Limited |
2. Ben Fuchs CATeams |
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