Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI) 2017

Experience new skills in the innovation process: Finding, defining and solving important problems and opportunities collaboratively with consensus and commitment to implement. "Simplexity Thinking" is simple, experiential and inclusive. Globally applied to tackle complex situations, Simplexity has transformed organizations into a "How might we?" culture. Several real-world application examples build understanding of how the process works. Opportunities are provided to share different experiences and ideas about own real-world problems. Learn from each other, and walk away with fresh insights to apply immediately. "Powered by your own style" means discovering your own Creative Problem Solving profile to help you and your team become better problem solvers. Personal insights enable customizing the process to make it more effective. Immersed in a safe learning environment, you will receive expert coaching to deepen the experience and maximize the impact. You will experience a facilitated Creative Problem Solving process with interconnected skills and tools. You will learn:
• Individual and group innovation skills at a concrete, person-to-person level.
• How to work in teams in a more inclusive, faster and innovative way.
• The art and science of Creative Problem Solving.
• Your own unique problem solving style and how to effectively work with other styles.
• How to better understand, define and uniquely solve your own real work problems.
• How to better implement innovative solutions.

You will be immersed in the essential energy of journaling• self-reflection to identify and overcome barriers and design the path to your greatest future. Your guides will share journalers through history and insights from their years of personal journaling experience. You will:
• Interact with several tools and techniques to find the journaling method that is most meaningful to you.
• Discover how to build a habit of nurturing self-reflection.
• Have lots of journaling time to get you started.
• Plan an approach to journaling throughout CPSI.
• Have the opportunity to connect during and toward the end of CPSI to review your journaling experience.
• Be invited to join a creativity journaling practitioners community on social media to share techniques, stories and examples during and after CPSI.

Empathy is the foundation of what we do. Whether we are conducting workshops with facilitators, teachers, consultants or others, we assume that our participants understand how to empathize in order for the groups to effectively design, problem solve, play, interact and build "what ifs." Yet, are we assuming too much? Are our expectations too high? Are we, as workshop presenters, taking the notion of empathy too lightly by assuming it is an universal experience? You will:
• Discover how we, as facilitators, consultants and educators might ensure that our colleagues, clients and students truly embody an empathetic position and mindset leading to greater awareness, compassion, understanding, equity and socially-conscious action.
• Use visual arts, movement, music, poetry and drama strategies and activities to learn how engage, empower and energize any group toward a dynamic, full-body exploration of an empathetic mindset.
• Gain a toolkit of activities you can use as brief, progressive lead-ins or more-prolonged backdrops to your own work to ensure that empathy is not only understood but experienced within the bodies and minds of your participants.

Do you want to make your facilitation sessions smooth and seamless? Do you occasionally miss the transitions in the process? Are you stressed before your facilitation sessions, anxious as you work through it and exhausted at the end? Do you want to move confidently through the Creative Problem Solving process so you can consistently produce breakthroughs for your clients, become more at ease in your facilitation sessions, or just up your facilitation game? In this highly interactive session, you will experience, practice and explore the inside moves that make the CPS process flow smoothly and with efficiency. Whether you are a beginning or advanced facilitator, you will:
• Learn how to improve your skills in facilitating the CPS process.
• Apply these skills to your own facilitation challenges and issues that you bring to the session.
• Experience how to smoothly and confidently transition from one stage to the next in the CPS process.
• Learn how to talk less and accomplish more in your session.
• Apply several tried-and-true, all-purpose CPS techniques that work 98% of the time.

Developmentally sensitive coaching and teaching strengthen our capacities to embrace the challenges of leadership and provide support for those we lead. Immunity to Change (ITC) is a powerful, learning-oriented approach for unleashing the potential of individuals, organizations and communities, and is a complement to the Creative Problem Solving process. You will work on getting better at something that is important to you, by engaging with Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey's ITC process. Do you have a personal improvement goal that has proven resistant to your sincerest intentions, smartest plans, and best efforts? Did you make a New Year's resolution for 2017 that hasn't quite come to pass? Move toward taking action to change your life in a meaningful way. You will:
• Learn the Immunity to Change (ITC) process.
• Distinguish technical and adaptive challenges.
• Identify a personal improvement goal that has proven resistant to change, competing commitments, and big assumptions.
• Apply the ITC Mapping process to begin closing the gap between good intentions and behaviors.
• Explore how the ITC Coaching Arc can help you overcome your immunity.
• Explore how to extend the ITC process and developmental theory to teams and organizations.

Come and experience the intersection of two great creative processes• Osborn-Parnes' Creative Problem Solving process and Otto Scharmer's Theory U "Leading from the Emerging Future" concepts. This dynamic and experiential session explores how Theory U interfaces with CPS to increase your creative leadership capacity. Discover how the three main principles of Theory U – Open Mind, Open Heart and Open Will – enrich and complement the CPS experience.Theory U is an awareness-based leadership process that invites us to reflect on and cultivate our strengths while simultaneously asking us to address our internal resistors of judgment, cynicism and fear. This process shifts us to clear thought, heightened emotional intelligence and courageous action, while increasing our capacity to lead positive individual, team
and community system change. Using the arts with reflective and interactive team activities, you will discover tools to amplify your curiosity,
compassion and courage and launch you toward your emerging future! You will:
• Expand your knowledge about Theory U, creating a synergistic relationship to Deep CPS Practice.
• Apply Deep CPS concepts and leadership practices personally and/or professionally.
• Learn Theory U strategies and the CPS process tools to kick-start a future theory YoU.

Join us on fascinating imaginary journeys connecting with creativity through a presentation of original inspiring paintings blended with heartwarming poetry. Come to take a glimpse into children's creative minds, which are colorful and rich with associations, bright insights and ideas. Practice Explore, Experience, Examine, Elevate and Express• Michelle's out-of-the-box interdisciplinary educating strategy that will help you facilitate young people's creativity through arts, nature, science and environment. Draw a vision for your children, grandchildren or students in order to guide their creative potential towards fulfillment. Come to become the kind of educator children need for thriving in the future world, directing their creativity towards positive productivity with a humane approach for life, empathy, joyfulness and optimism. Since children's creativity is stifled by education, much of their potential remains unknown. Eventually computers will become creative, too. Let's explore and amplify human creativity beforehand. You will:
• Step into the roles of the 21st century mentoring educator.
• Learn to identify individual creative potential and direct it towards fulfillment.
• Be equipped with practical tools for fostering children's and youth's creative thinking and other 21st century skills like communication, conflict managing and open-mindedness.

Come and use hands-on craft skills and art-making experiences to express your ideas in the context of creatively solving problems. While today's current technology provides access to huge amounts of data, it falls short in its ability to quickly and economically manipulate two- and three-dimensional objects. Our prehistoric ancestors, in contrast, basically moved to become modern through the hands-on use of materials to create inventions. This may soon become a lost art. In this session, recover some of this for yourself. Beyond the playtime, arts and crafts provide another language to enable Creative Problem Solving. This visual and tactile aspect amplifies the linguistic understanding of a problem and provides a gateway to explore solutions non-verbally. You will:
• Apply visual techniques through all steps of the CPS process.
• Integrate art and craft techniques to create strong and effective presentations.
• Create multi-view drawings.

Discover strategies for entering kinetic dialogue with others, which focus on our untapped capacity for observing, attending and responding to the environment and other moving bodies via tactile, visual and auditory investigation. We begin with exploring attending, observing and strategic decision-making via processes used by groups ranging from performers to the Naval War College. This approach nudges aside assumptions, accesses unexpected choices, and asks us to consider our accountability for making choices. We explore the politics of choice-making as creative individuals. You will:
• Engage in a process of personal discovery about creativity, communication and decision making.
• Gain new skill sets and strategies that will enhance your creativity.
• Engage in evocative dialogue and reflection to apply the concepts and learning experienced in this workshop.
Movers of all ages and abilities are welcome. This workshop is led by one of the CPSI 2017 Spotlight presenters.

There is an increasing trend for AMPlified events – such as national-level summits, public comment meetings, town hall meetings, conferences, and other large-gathering events. Yet, such events can be extremely challenging due to the large numbers of participants, contentious issues, passionate opinions, outsized egos, etc. So how does one AMPlify, plan, and handle such events? By HACKING them creatively. Join an experienced designer/facilitator of AMPed events to:
• Discover examples ofand the breadth of opportunity for large Amped-up events.
• Learn best practices, tools, techniques and tips that work – and some that don't.
• Practice in a role-play mode using these best practices.
• Share your success stories, your horror stories and your best practices, too.

Personal Disruption is not just a novel concept leading to greater fulfillment and creativity, but rather a necessity in 2017 and into the future. Driven by the exponential growth of technology, the world is full of unpredictability and an increasing pace of life that leaves a feeling of insecurity and instability. Even though life sometimes feels like a tsunami that is uncontrollable, overwhelming and unstoppable, there are ways to navigate this storm. While people have surfed oceans for decades, in this session we will take you on a unique surf trip, learning to ride and master your biggest waves. Disruption is about choice. You will either be a disruptor, be disrupted or in denial. What's it going to be for you? You will:
• Identify roadblocks in all aspects of your life.
• Practice and learn tools, techniques and exercises that can amplify growth.
• Develop a master plan and first set of action items for the following weeks.

Are you looking for new tools to help people innovate? This workshop is hard fun and could be just what you need. This is a facilitated thinking and communications technique. It draws on extensive research from the field of business, organization development, psychology and learning. Using hand-brain knowledge, this process helps teams surface information, explore ideas, create better options, develop deeper knowledge and identify solutions faster with 100% engagement. You will both experience the flow of being a client, and also debrief from a facilitator's perspective. The room has two areas, the play table for experience, and the theory area for facilitation debrief. You will:
• Add LEGO bricks and directives to your workshops to improve engagement.
• Apply a five-step processes to improve communication.
• Identify when LEGO Serious Play can be most useful.
• Supplement your creative program.
• Avoid conversational roundabouts.
• Use flow theory and underlying neuroscience principles that make this so powerful and memorable.
• Facilitate and explore ideas on a deeper level using this fun tool.
Space is limited; this day counts toward full certification in LEGO Serious Play.

Creative Problem Solving is a process that is learned through repeated, guided experiences. The curriculum content may be set; however, the learning strategies and process are ours. If students learn to use their intellectual curiosity, they can learn curriculum content simultaneously. The arts amplify CPS through engaging eyes, ears, bodies, and story. Discover arts-integrated strategies through CPS process to deliver any curriculum content. Explore one or two large ideas, such as amplification or intensity through music, visual art, dance and drama/storytelling. Learn how the arts represent ways of knowing, which artistic processes are ideally suited for CPS tasks, and ways to use the arts to amplify problem solving and concept development. You will:
• Discover the relationship between different ways of knowing and the arts disciplines of music, visual art, dance, and drama.
• Identify the artistic processes of creating, performing, responding and connecting, and compare them to characteristics of CPS.
• Experience and learn arts-integration strategies through which to engage learners and explore/deliver curriculum content.

Mission Impossible music plays as a man, wearing a trench coat with an upturned collar and low-brimmed Fedora hat, slinks into the team retreat and leaves a briefcase at the front of the conference room. A few minutes later, the Project Leader walks into the room and, after some furtive glances to the right and left, carefully opens the brief case. A tape recording begins: "Good Morning, Mr. Leader. We face a serious situation, which requires the Mission Impossible Innovation Team." Stories add interest and intrigue to innovation, Creative Problem Solving, and strategic planning sessions. This session is designed to help business leaders and consultants in innovation and change management incorporate stories, storytelling and story listening into their work as agents of change. It will provide practical tools and techniques to enable the use of stories in the CPS process. You will use story-based activities to:
• Deepen insights and build empathy.
• Help a team develop a shared vision.
• Spark the flow of ideas during ideation.
• Frame strategies in story structures.
• Pitch winning ideas.

Imagine a world saturated with beautiful photos and inspiring poetry. This workshop invites you to create such a world. We are going to explore traditional and non-traditional guidelines for composition in photography by looking at photographic gurus whose photos leave a lasting impression. We will discuss compositional considerations and highlight those that seem to be the most effective in intensifying a photo's beauty. We will also look at photos that amplified their effect by challenging compositional assumptions and photographic norms. After that inspiration, we will then take some time to compose and take beautiful photos around the University at Buffalo campus. After sharing, some digital editing, and creating a gallery of marvelous images, we will shift to sharing and discussing poetic form. We will become familiar with several poems and their poetic forms. Using these poetic forms and our collaborative skills, we will author some new poems. We will create a beautiful gallery of photos and poems so that each person can select and share a poem and a photo that synergistically go together. You will:
• Learn photographic and poetic compositional guidelines.
• Create photos and poems with composition in mind.
• Use creativity to evoke or challenge traditional composition guidelines.