The Best Ideas in the Room: Drawing Out Your Team's Creativity in Problem Solving and Strategic Planning
Join a live brainstorm on a real campus challenge, and leave with three practices you can run next week.
Picture this. A problem lands on your unit's plate, and your team gathers around the conference table. The leader opens with a proposal or asks, "What do we think?" For the next thirty minutes a few ideas get tossed out, and one by one they're picked apart or politely praised until one answer rises to the top. It's usually the safest one.
That's rarely how we find our best ideas. Good ideas start rough, and they get better when people share them unpolished and build on each other's thinking. In a high-stakes meeting, though, most of us edit ourselves until there's nothing risky left to say. When a three-year strategic plan or a budget decision is on the line, that silence is expensive.
We need a room where a half-formed thought gets a real hearing and people can enjoy the process. That kind of room can be built on purpose. Research points to simple ways to draw out more ideas and better ones, and in this session we'll practice them together. If a strategic plan, a retreat, or a hard problem is in front of your team this year, this session is built for the room you'll be leading.
In 60 minutes, you'll leave with:
A simple rule from theater class that gives half-baked ideas room to grow into good ones.
A brainstorm that gets every voice on the page and keeps the team generating ideas past the obvious first answers.
A 10-minute habit that keeps your leadership team bringing its best ideas to every new problem.
We'll save time for Q&A. Share your challenge when you register, and we'll pick one to workshop live in the room.
Host: Kevin Sanders, D.M.A., A.C.C.
Kevin is a classically-trained musician who has spent 20+ years in higher education at regional public universities and at public and private R1 institutions, many of those in leadership as director and dean. He's a trained facilitator and a certified change management practitioner, with training in design thinking from the Stanford d.school and Cornell. He works with institutions on strategic planning and leadership-team retreats.