School for Innovators
Leadership through innovation, taught the way an expedition is run.
The driving concept behind the School for Innovators is a vision of a network of highly motivated and unusually skilled in-house innovators, energized and dedicated to creating an environment for innovation, creativity, continuous improvement and positive change across their organizations. The goal of the School is to transform people into thinking guides, able to guide groups into diffferent thinking, jumpstart new ideas, and mindshift teams into innovative change.
What
A particularly intense eight-day curriculum built on the model of an operational Thinking Expedition. The planned route integrates small- and large-group facilitation tools with leadership skills, building on outdoors experiential learning. The School focuses on applying creativity to real problems within the students’ own organizations; ample time is spent hands-on, learning and practicing new skills.
Who
Enrollment is normally limited to 20 participants. Nominations come from organizations faced with large-scale change or a pressing need for “diffferent”. Students set the focus of the curriculum with the real-world problems they bring, and leave with strategies for innovation to put into practice immediately.
Where and when
Normally Estes Park, Colorado, at the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park. The School is a “school without walls” and has been held in Houston, Midland and Fredericksburg, Texas; Charlotte and Eden, North Carolina; Sydney and Melbourne; and Auckland. It is scheduled on demand, driven by client organizations who see the need for in-house innovators and change agents.
Syllabus
What the eight days cover
Just-in-time, hands-on tools
Direct experience with creative techniques and tools, working with real clients on tough, real-world issues: learn it when you need it and apply it at once.
Ideation
Become comfortable facilitating and guiding small groups and meetings, standing up and leading a group through idea-finding and idea-generating sessions.
Levels of Change
Use the seven levels of change as a model for connecting creativity and innovation with continuous improvement and quality, from level 1 to breakthrough thinking at level 7.
Thinking about thinking
Understand your own creative style and risk orientation, the way you think and the way you don’t, and how to move around your own mental blocks, filters and paradigms.
Creative Problem Solving
From simple tools to your own model for facilitating every stage: mess-finding, problem-finding, data-finding, idea-finding, solution-finding, acceptance-finding and action-planning.
Diffferent meetings
Plan, coordinate and facilitate any meeting so that the agenda is energized with innovative thinking; refocus any meeting on the spot with a 5-Minute Meeting.
Jumpstarting and energizing ideas
Rapidly expand an idea into a concept with an implementation plan; build a network of support for it; launch it.
Creative style and type
How you listen and speak, take in information, decide and approach life, and how to compare and leverage creative styles within groups.
Colorado Mountain School
Learning the Ropes and rock climbing sharpen your edge and push your risk-taking boundaries, then transfer into leading small groups and teams.
Lateral thinking excursions
Visual connection techniques and video springboards to get groups unstuck on the really tough problems.
The Thinking Guide’s Fieldbook and the Innovator’s Toolbox
Each School adds to the Fieldbook for Thinking Expeditions; every graduate leaves with a copy and with a creative thinking journal and tool kit.
History
A school without walls since 1988
The first School for Innovators was held in Midland, Texas, in 1988. Since then dozens of versions have been offered, each one unique and distinct from its predecessors. The design progressed from three days to five, then to a full week-long intense format, 7:30 in the morning until 10 at night or later. In 1993 the School began to operate along Thinking Expedition lines with great success.
Alumni flashbacks
“To change the way you do things, you must first change the way you think. The School for Innovators has totally changed the way I think.”
“Stretching your creativity can be just as scary as stepping out over the void on a rock climb, and just as entertaining.”
“A firehose of new ideas, thinking, experiences. Intense. I survived!”
Graduates have come from
Air Force Intelligence Agency · AT&T · Avery Dennison R&D · British Petroleum · Central Intelligence Agency · Chase Manhattan Bank · Department of Defense · Exxon · Federal Aviation Agency · Ford Motor Company · General Mills · Hoechst-Celanese · Houston Independent School District · IBM · Johnson & Johnson · KFC Australia and New Zealand · National Security Agency · Naval Sea Systems Command · Naval War College · Pennsylvania State University · Procter & Gamble · Steelcase · Texaco · U.S. Air Force · U.S. Army · U.S. Navy Smart Ship Project · University of Chicago · Waste Management
Apply, or ask about a corporate School
Nominations are welcome at any time; a School is scheduled when a client organization needs one. Corporate Schools for Innovators are designed to order.