Breakout Sessions and Thought Leader Panels
Schedule-at-a-Glance
12 experiential breakout sessions ~ 4 compelling thought leader panels ~ 4 awesome choices each time period
9:00-9:30 Opening Session
9:30-10:45 Improvisational Storyteller • Your Creative Power • Breathing Life into Your Story
Social Media Panel
11:00-12:15 Performance of a Lifetime • Hacking the Hippocampus • Holistic Innovation
Creative Work Cultures Panel
12:15-1:30 Lunch
1:30-2:00 Storytelling Plenary Session (with John Hagel, Annalie Killian, Rita King & James Jorasch)
2:00-3:15 Creative Solution Finding • The Power of Narrative • Whole Systems Change
Creative Leadership Panel
3:30-4:45 Visual Brainstorming • Movement Anthropology • The New About Me
Cocreation and Emergence Panel
5:00-5:30 Nonverbal Creativity Closing Session (led by Michelle James & Anthony Hyatt)
5:30-7:00 Improvisation Imagination Festival and Connectworking (led by Kat Koppett & Cathy Salit)
7:30 Post-conference dinner at Mie N Yu restaurant
There is an entrepreneur track and an organizational track from which to choose during each time slot.
Thought Leader Panels With Audience Participation
We're having four Thought Leader Panels throughout the day. We've assembled a team of pioneers, creators and leading edge thinkers in the fields of applied creativity and imagination, innovation, leadership, organizational culture, co-creation, emergence and social media who will be exploring Navigating the New Work Paradigm through the lens' of the panel theme. Audience members will be invited to actively engage in the lively dialogues.
Content-rich Experiential Breakout Sessions
You'll have a plethora of interactive breakout sessions from which to choose throughout the day. Each will have a different focus around the common theme of Creativity in Business. Sessions cover individual creativity, business creativity, and organizational creaitvity. Whole-brain engagement includes improv theater, visual thinking, memory enhancing, storytelling, embodiment and much more!
Session Descriptions ~ 9:30-10:45
The Improvisational Storyteller: Harvesting and Crafting Stories in the Moment and for the Moment with Kat Koppett, founder of Kopett + Co.
Organizations have come to appreciate the value of conscious storytelling as a tool for influencing and inspiring others, capturing knowledge, solving problems and building culture. Concurrently, business professionals have been turning to the world of improv to build their responsiveness, flexibility, awareness and collaboration skills. In this highly experiential session, participants will explore the great synergy available when combining these two approaches. We will apply improv principles to harvesting, crafting and delivering stories. Exercise your listening and awareness muscles; play with tools for crafting well-made stories; generate stories individually and collectively; apply storytelling and improv techniques to your real-world issues; learn where, when and how to use improvisational storytelling; and have a rockin’ time! Leave with tools for creating cogent, meaningful, motivating stories; story applications that address your real-life experiences; and techniques for gathering stories from others. No improv experience is necessary.
Breathing Life into Your Story: Activating Your Customer's Imagination to Generate Emotional Buy-In with Corey Michael Blake, President of Round Table Companies
In this cluttered world, full of so much information, those who use entertaining formats to deliver their message creatively are the ones who will break through and not only hit their audience in the emotional gut, but create long-lasting impressions and two-way communication. Learning to tell the story of your business, service, or product, is only the first step. Once the words are in place, how do you breathe life into them? Corey Michael Blake specializes in the delivery of stories through books, comics, film, documentary and more. This highly experiencial workshop is designed for the entrepreneur/business leader who knows their story and is looking for unique ways to deliver and monetize it. You will engage your whole-brain in ways that ignite your imagination - and the imagination of your clients - and highlight opportunities for creative delivery. You will go beneath the surface and discover new ways to deliver your story in a compelling way that breaks through the clutter and captures your customers imagination and interest. Leave with an understanding of what authentic emotional buy-in from your target audience looks and feels like, and a new approach to generate creativity.
Your Creative Power: Routinely Making the Impossible Possible with Bill Smith, PhD, Director of ODII
What if you could bring your most creative visions to life, or move through your toughest challenges, in a way that would achieve results that you now think are impossible? In this session, you will learn and experience how to release the awesome creative powers that exist in any personal, organizational or community situation. You will discover, explore and experience a whole-brain, holographic approach to achieving business results called AIC (Appreciation, Influence and Control). You will learn and practice how to use the AIC process to: 1) Invoke the source of infinite creativity and the timeless wisdom of our collective unconscious to transcend your current perspective and open it to new levels of insight; 2) Leverage this creative power to ensure that you use the creativity inherent in the whole of your situation; 3) To evolve a pattern of leadership that naturally becomes more creative, generative and holistic; and 4) Achieve higher levels of purpose while creating solutions that are more aesthetically designed, produce more harmonious relationships and make more economic use of resources. You will leave with a 7-step creative, holographic process you can apply at any level of your work or business - from quick problem solving to creating new models to designing global systems.
11:00-12:15
Performance of a Lifetime: Improvisation and Theater for Professional and Personal Growth
with Cathy Rose Salit, CEO of Performance of a Lifetime
Cathy will lead you through exercises and ideas that she uses in working with executives at Fortune 500 companies as well as entrepreneurs. This dynamic session will give you hands-on experience in using improvisation and theater to improve communication, leadership and collaboration. This unusual framework for teaching “soft skills” is high-impact, highly creative, speaks to the top of people’s intelligence, and helps people to grow socially and emotionally - whether you work for yourself or in an organization. Leave with new concepts and techniques for active listening; exercises that enhance communication and shared understanding; increased self awareness; a new understanding of creativity as a social, collectively built “ensemble performance”; and belly aches from laughing so much! No improv or theater experience is necessary.
Hacking the Hippocampus: Engaging your Whole-Brain to Enhance Your Memory and Create an Impactful Message with memory expert James Jorasch, founder of ScienceHouse
From childhood we are told to memorize facts and remember details but are never shown how to use our creative brains to do it. In this dynamic session, memory expert James Jorasch, a six-time competitor at the US Memory Championships, will guide you through a series of whole-brain techniques to develop your memory - not just to memorize content, but to give your words more meaning and impact by helping your audience remember your message, enabling them to pass your message on. We all have messages to deliver, whether in a leadership role, to communicate features of a product or service, or to help an idea spread and stick in the mind of a listener. Join James to learn practices to help you increase your mental capacity for visual thinking, the playground of novel ideas. Engage your creativity to construct a memory palace and learn how to hack the hippocampus (the part of the brain responsible for consolidating memory) by "tricking” the conscious mind so that particular messages are securely tucked into long term memory. This can be done with your brain, and also with the brains of every potential collaborator, client, and customer. Learn how to create memories like souvenirs for others to take away from your talk, event or pitch. By practicing these techniques, you'll have greater access to your creativity in other situations requiring quick, creative thinking in your work and life.
Creative Problem Solving, Creative Behavior, and Holistic Innovation
with Gregg Fraley, Co-founder of Kiln Ideas, Ltd.
In this experiential session, you will engage in a creative process, based on the Osborn-Parnes CPS method, for challenge exploration, ideation, and action planning or new vision creation. It’s structured creativity, alternating divergence and convergence. We will explore Idea Generation, with preparation components before the brainstorming or ideation step, and action planning on the back-end. It can be used as a foundational piece in organizational creativity and innovation, as well as personal creative behavior. We'll connect CPS and creative thinking into daily life, as well as how organizations become more holistically creative and impact their innovation cultures. Learn kinesthetic, trend-based, story-based, and arts-based tools and techniques that are being used by cutting-edge practitioners and facilitators around the world. The session’s experiential “walk through” of CPS is also applicable to personal, small business/entrepreneurial innovation. Leave with working knowledge of the CPS process you can apply anytime; a good start on solving a personal, business or organizational challenge; using the method with a road map to completion after the session; a fresh perspective on the role of structured creativity as part of the big; and picture of organizational innovation; and ideas on how to integrate more deliberate creativity into your daily behavior.
2:00-3:15
Creative Solution Finding: Immediate-Access Discovery Methods for Solopreneurs, Leaders and Teams with Dr. Win Wenger, Founder of Project Renaissance
In this highly interactive session, you will learn cutting edge methods you can use both individually and with others to immediately access your best solutions - putting them to work on real visions, challenges or issues in real time. You will explore easy-to-learn, easy-to-use whole brain methods for creative discovery leading to new solutions, inventiveness and innovation; moving forward in any situation; and using more of your natural creative abilities anytime. In addition to accessing your own creativity, you'll learn how to engage the ingenuity and perceptions of others - colleagues, team, staff, clients, etc. Bring a real-life work-related situation - it can be anything from an innovative vision you want to create to a complex problem you need to solve. You will gain fresh new insights and perspectives on it as you learn repeatable methods you can apply at work and home to any situation. You will take with you techniques to use for improving solutions and opportunities, creating new visions and directions, moving through creative blocks and accomplishing your business goals. And you will leave the session energized from tapping into deeper levels of your own creative "flow" and practical brilliance!
The Power of Narrative for a Creative Work Place
with Jack Ricchiuto, founder of Designing Life
Since the beginning of time, stories have been at the heart of everything creative and transformational. When we reclaim the power of narrative, we connect to our deepest collaborative capacities for new ideas that work. In this session, you will experience practical ways to engage three kinds of narrative that take the creative process to new levels, and are applicable in any workplace. We will focus on possibility narratives that inspire, agile user stories that focus, and success stories that attract support. In these contexts, we will work from the principle that the power of narrative is in our capacity for storycrafting, storytelling, and storylistening. You will engage a rich, dynamic process that will be learner-centered, informative, experiential, and practical. Leave with practical and innovative ways to use stories to invigorate the creative process; engage people's strengths and passions in creative ventures; create rich collaborations through the power of narrative; discover your inner storyteller; and impact real change in your work and life.
Creative, Alive, Whole Systems Change Management: Innovative Design, Development and Delivery with Carol Sanford, Change-Maker Extraordinaire
Discover and experience overview of a Master Framework, based on decades of Whole Systems Change effort - working with innovation in strategy, leadership and management system design/redesign - combined with applying living systems principles and practices. We will explore the difference between working from only from what you know and working form the field of emerging potential; and the difference between "thoughting" (via David Bohm) and generative thinking. You will experience "holistic" approaches and methods as we creatively engage case studies of real business systems that produced extraordinary changes in ecology, community, human and financial as well as changing market practices and industry thinking. From Fortune 500 to small business, from developed and undeveloped nations, transformation can happen anywhere. The same processes used to create the changes in these systems will be used to conduct the workshop - you'll get an mini-experience of working using whole systems thinking and processes. Leave with a philosophical and practical framework you can apply your own business or work team; a way to develop reflection questions to gain more clarity and purposeful outcomes; and a shift in the way you engage your work.
3:30-4:45
Visual Brainstorming for Business
with Sean Kelly, Principal of Sean Kelly Studio
Imagination begins with the word "image." and getting an idea is often called "having a vision." In this stimulating session, we will explore how visual thinking allows individuals and teams to produce original solutions to challenging problems. More than drawing circles and arrows on a whiteboard, visual thinking involves using images as tools to allow the creative and emotional part of the brain to process information intuitively. To understand a problem, it helps to literally see it. Pictures inspire the brain to find unexpected connections and new possibilities. Sensory experience, perceptual thinking, and visualization complement reason, critical thinking, and linear logic. Visual thinking, vital at every stage of the creative process, helps us to observe, record, organize, evaluate and manifest ideas. These techniques can be applied to any situation, from daily decision making to product development to strategic planning. Explore how business leaders can adopt the traits of artists; using signs, symbols and icons in our industries as the building blocks of creativity; and how to translate a problem from verbal to visual and back again. Leave with practices for brainstorming on your own as if you're in a group; improving your visual thinking skills to convey messages more clearly; visual design techniques to model a problem question and construct an answer; and simple exercises to improve your attention, awareness and visual sensitivity. No drawing skills are necessary.
Movement Anthropology: Create New Stories and Embody Change for Creativity in Work
with Leilani Raashida Henry, President of Being and Living Enterprises
Discover unconscious patterns in your everyday movements to unlock energy and information in the cells, create more effectively, and achieve more positive outcomes in your work. Movement patterns are part of our human story. When we are more conscious of our movement history, we multiply our awareness and align our actions with our desired future in our work and life. Movement patterns give you needed information about what’s flowing within you, your team or organization. Unconscious patterns can inhibit our creativity. Many of us are unaware of how we hold and move our bodies, particularly under stress. In this lively session, you will explore movements that promote positive choice, change and novelty vs. movement that constricts and prevents new thoughts and congruent feeling. You will gain more access to the creative spark within to more easily embody change, access creative solutions and connect with others. Leave with the ability to identify the relationship between movement, creativity and learning; a deeper relationship with your authentic self and greater effectiveness with colleagues, customers, and other stakeholders; find simple movements to increase congruent expression to embody choice and change; and creative embodiment practices that enhance leadership and keep you clear of habits that no longer serve you.
The New About Me: Reinventing Your Bio as a Story
with Michael Margolis, President of GetStoried
As an entrepreneur or creative, people invest in YOU, as much as your product, service, or solution. Yet, how does your bio measure up for the task? Truth is, most of us suffer from "bio inadequacy syndrome". We're afraid of two extremes: (1) pretentious self-importance, or (2) boring earnestness. In the end, we fail to reveal who we really are, and fret why people don't appreciate the fullness of what we offer? We all have a bigger and epic story to tell. And it’s the story everybody’s waiting to hear. Because of social media, your bio is more important than ever, as the first point of contact, vetting, or referral. In this lively, interactive session, you will apply proven storytelling principles to reinvent your bio and better attract the future you want to create. The insights from this session can be applied directly back to your Personal Bio, LinkedIn profile, and overall social media presence. Explore finding and expressing your natural authority: who you were born to bel why credentials and qualifications are really just second fiddle; when and how to use external validators to support the story; how to represent yourself appropriately for the circles you travel in; and how to more easily attract the kind of opportunities/relationships you've always dreamed of.
Creativity in Business Conference 2011
