Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI) 2017

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.

When we think about inventions, the clever object often comes to mind. Social inventions differ from these clever objects in that they organize people into functional groups, whether these inventions are formal or informal. They can be as simple as a Little League baseball team, or as complex as General Motors or the Catholic Church. Not to be left behind, Clever Object Inventions often help define the social invention. For example, the ball, glove and bat are iconic enough to have strong associations to the game of baseball. In fact, all artifacts refer back to a social invention. What if we made new connections between diverse artifacts? What sorts of social inventions would we be describing? Does this give us an ability to modify social contracts? You will:
• Explore the phenomenon, history and structure of social inventions.
• Identify social inventions by the artifacts that define them.
• Apply diagrams to describe the organization of social inventions.

In this modern, networked and collaborative world, your creativity and expertise alone are not enough to achieve big results. You also need influence and persuasion skills to convince others that your creativity and expertise merit their attention and commitment. You will:
• Learn the specific tools and techniques necessary to influence and persuade others to provide you with critical attention and commitment to your ideas.
• Discover a power model that provides proven steps for influence and persuasion, a framework to recognize and leverage the different thinking styles and mindsets you will encounter, the 10 laws of influence and persuasion that automatically trigger the responses you require, and a four-phrase process to deliver presentations that gain attention and commitment for your ideas.
• Walk away with an action plan for your further growth and success.

We have the markers, the brainstorming guidelines, the dots. Yet in seconds, a difficult participant can unravel our plans, our designs and our success because what we DON'T have are strategies to handle these unpredictable people! Each of us has experienced this pain, right? If we're lucky we navigated it. But there's no need to rely on luck – the process is simple when the core principles are in place. You will:
• Learn how to analyze the behaviors of these challenging personalities and which prevention and intervention techniques you can apply to alter their behavior.
• Explore the importance of being respectful of difficult particiapnts, even if they don’t seem to deserve it.
• Learn how to keep calm when faced with people who push your buttons.

In our turbulent world, problems facing organizations are much more complex than ever before and require collaboration across different disciplines for innovative solutions. However, people have different problem-solving styles. This reality makes it difficult for people with different styles to work together efficiently to create real change. Disover an implementable cognitive problem-solving process that enables collaborative innovation. Individuals identify their unique preferences for different stages for the innovation process and learn how to synergize their efforts, avoiding the frustration and dysfunction that typifies much teamwork. Teams can effectively learn how to complete each other rather than cancel each other. We will provide real-world examples and a proven instrument to measure individual preferences. You will:
• Raise your self-awareness about your own innovation style.
• Take steps to successfully innovate together in cognitively diverse teams.
• Facilitate the integration of diverse expertise to manage innovative projects through to completion.

Schools are expected to teach students to be creative. But how do we know what works to develop student creativity? How do we know if creative skills are improving in individuals, students and in the workforce? Educators are asking for more student assessments that go beyond standardized testing to include the measurement of creativity. Our society values most what can be measured. We will explore the challenge of measuring imagination to increase its value in schools, business and government. We will introduce H-IQ (Hunter Imagination Questionnaire), the first measurement that charts the growth of individual imagination, the ideation capacity that leads to creativity and innovation. H-IQ is being applied in pilot programs in Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts schools after MRI measurements established strong correlation between H-IQ scores and brain structures associated with creativity. You will:
• Evaluate creativity assessments, including divergent thinking tests, measures of personality style, and new measures of imagination.
• Explore how these assessments can best serve the individual.
• Learn about the H-IQ (Hunter Imagination Questionnaire), the first measurement that charts the growth of individual imagination.

Techniques to AMPLIFY idea generation tend to focus on cognitive methods. But we have another resource for improving creative productivity that is often overlooked, but no less powerful – space. In fact, our physical surroundings have an enormous impact on our ability to solve problems, generate original ideas, and see the world in a fresh light, often without us being aware of it. We’ll explore how the built environment influences creative thinking and how we can apply evidence-based research to increase our creative output. Topics covered include color, lighting, materials, furnishings, artwork, sound, plantscaping, planning, details and others. No special design expertise required! Bonus exercise: Bring one to two digital photos of your creative space to the session and we'll explore what makes it work for you (and if there's any room for making it even better). You will:
• Understand the role environmental psychology plays in creative thinking.
• Apply practical techniques for optimizing creative space for maximum idea generation.
• Source materials useful to developing an effective creative environment.

Everyone is talking about design thinking these days. Ever wonder what it's all about? Roll up your sleeves and give design thinking a try in this zippy 90-minute clinic. You will work in pairs to design something delightful, based on your discovery of each other's needs. You will practice each stage of the design process (immerse, frame, imagine and prototype) and have a chance to reflect on ways design thinking might amplify your creative process. You will:
• Learn what is at the heart of design thinking.
• Design something of value based on empathy and feedback.
• Explore how design methods might enhance your innovation practice.

BrandCrafting is a simple tool for agencies and clients to collaboratively plan their brand communication, humanize it, and find a sticky message. Ever wondered why, despite all your efforts, sales remain flat? Perhaps it is not your brand, it’s the message or how consumers perceive you. As businesses enter the creative era, innovative thinking and strategy are not enough because consumers are constantly changing – what worked then may not work now. You wil learn to:
• Build your future by understanding how consumers perceive your brand.
• Develop your skills in discovering what you don’t know yet – by understanding needs and finding the human value in your brand’s offering.
• Stretch your thinking to help you define your marketing message and ideas.
• Familiarize yourself with communication/account planning and get the clarity needed to collaboratively develop the best creativity with your advertising agency.
This workshop is targeted to marketers, brand managers, researchers and advertisers.

Let’s admit it. You are not able to feel creative because you have no time. During your work routine, it is hard to make time to daydream, be flexible, and ask questions when your supervisor wants some answers immediately. How do you manage that pressure and integrate creativity in a sector that is under-appreciating true innovation culture? Unfortunately, until a new look is taken, the current 87% of professionals worldwide who are feeling stuck and lack a creative outlet will remain that way. But there is a solution. It’s rethinking creativity. You will:
• Experience how to integrate creative thinking as a practical, tangible and life-skill set.
• Integrate creativity into habit building
• Learn how to articulate creativity in a professional setting and help others understand the value of creativity at work.
For the second half, we will learn how to articulate and share these values as an educator, facilitator, leader in an organization, or an employee.

Creativity and conflict exist as realities in our daily lives. They have an implicitly shared identity – one cannot exist without the other. Creativity causes conflict, yet creativity is needed to generate new solutions to existing dilemmas to resolve conflicts. Connections, relationships and ambiguities among and between conflict and creativity will be explored, especially correlations between Creative Problem Solving and conflict resolution. You will:
• Challenge your assumptions and mental models, as both blocks to creativity and causes of conflict.
• Synthesize relationships between your creative attributes and your orientation to conflict.
• Strengthen your active listening and responding skills through small-group discussion and interactions.

How do you make your audience listen? How do you make them believe in your product/service? And when they do, how do you move them from belief to action? Through simplicity and persuasion techniques, we can have your target audience come to his/her most logical conclusion, which reflects yours. In other words, help buyers to buy. You will learn:
• Different persuasion tactics and case studies about how to use them.
• How simplicity can give you the most sophisticated solutions.
• How to use persuasion techniques
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• How to develop communication materials that deliver result$.
• To improve your communication skills.