Creative workplace workshop

Date Location Tuition Economic Developers Association of Canada (EDAC) Point Value
Available on demand Your community

See below

TBA

This team-building workshop helps organizations become more creative from the ground up. The ability to learn and to create are requisites for any organization that seeks sustained growth and success. Firms that have developed a meaningful strategy to enable innovation are also considered very satisfying workplaces.

Each participant takes a FourSight tool to discover their creativity style and what role they play in a team setting. When everyone on the team knows how they fit, performance is improved while conflict is reduced. The results enable leaders to build balanced teams of Clarifiers, Ideators, Implementers, and Integrators.

Target audiences

Economic development offices/departments, other public or private sector groups, local business clients. 

Facilitator

Geoff Malleck

Geoff is a lecturer at Waterloo and an assistant director of the Economic Development Program. He's our resident entrepreneurship expert and continues to explore the principles and conditions that drive the ‘Creativity-Innovation-Entrepreneurship’ Continuum and the relationship with economic prosperity and culture. Geoff also works on corporate strategic development with a focus in workplace creativity. 

More information

Sharon Jones, Economic development program administrator.

Session descriptions

Choose one of the following themes for a half day experience, or both for a full day experience.

Theme one: Creativity as a mechanism to solve problems and implement change

For years creativity seemed like a lost art. Technology-rich business processes and increasing demands for individual productivity were the pursuit of managers in the ‘progressive workplace’. However these same organizations seemed to languish in an inability to stay ahead of the competition by offering better products and services. What is increasingly being understood by the enlightened organization is the need to enable creativity and innovation to realize success. 

This workshop introduces the fundamental elements associated with creativity and how members of an organization can better perform by understanding their creative preferences.

Modules

  1. Introducing the four P’s of the creative process.
  2. Why this matters to you and the organization?
  3. What is the cause for our failure to develop and employ?
  4. Understanding your creative preferences
    1. Completion/ review of your creative preference profile
    2. Understanding your results of the assessment
  5. Leveraging your creative preferences to enhance group dynamics
    1. Sharing your perspective of the implications
    2. Practice round
    3. Debrief

Theme two: Workplace creativity and strategic design

Much has been discussed about the entrepreneur/ new venture capitalist but there is also a need to better understand the conditions that create a ‘long-run’ entrepreneurial organization. It is this organization that creates a sustainable business model- one that is fuelled by the passion and creative spirit of all who work there. What motivates an employee to dare to create? What conditions must reside in the workplace to enable innovation? How is strategy an important catalyst to enable everyone to contribute by providing creative solutions to problems?

Modules

  1. Understanding the basics of integrating creative design into strategy
    1. Effective design
    2. Meaningful implementation
  2. Design
    1. What is captured in strategic design enables creativity
    2. Intelligence gathering as a problem solving mechanism
  3. Implementation
    1. Strategic controls and structure to kick strategic butt!
    2. Controls
      1. Topics include how we hire, motivate, inspire
      2. How we measure
    3. Structure
      1. How a firm is designed as a creativity catalyst

Tuition

The organization is responsible for providing a venue and catering (if required). The maximum number of participants is set at 18 to ensure a high quality team experience.

  Half day Full day
Groups of 6-10 $475 per person $675 per person
Groups of 11-18 $435 per person $635 per person