DAY ONE | THINK DIFFERENTLY: UNLOCKING CREATIVE THINKING AND REFRAMING PROBLEMS

SESSION 1: Creative Mindset & Innovation Confidence

Why Innovation and Human Centred Design is more important than ever.

• Introduction to a Innovation centric way of thinking:
  • All problems are solvable, and the people who have the problems are the ones who have the answers.
  • You can’t come up with new ideas if you just exist in your own life or walk in your own shoes.
  • It’s about iterating, testing, tinkering, risk, experimenting, failing, and embracing ambiguity throughout the process.
• Innovation handbrakes and how to avoid them
• The language of Innovation
• Developing creative confidence

Activity

Epistemic Motivation Check: Participants self-assess their comfort with ambiguity, complexity and curiosity, then reflect in pairs on how this shapes how they lead and solve problems.

SESSION 2: Get a PHD in Your Customers Challenges

Spending time in other people's shoes to understand their point of view.

• Understanding extreme users’ scenarios
• Empathy Case studies
• The importance of observation and being highly curious

Activity

1. Creating Empathy Maps for customers and users to get different perspectives.
2. Creating User Journey Maps.

Review

• What did we learn from the empathy work?
• What were we curious about?
• What surprised us?

SESSION 3: Reframing Challenges: Don’t be an answer looking for a problem

Defining the problem sets the direction and scope for creative solutions, ensuring efforts are focused on addressing the root cause rather than just symptoms or the ‘perceived problem’.

• Based on the empathy work: Are we solving the right problem?
• Create design challenge statements and run it through a continuous checklist:
• Clear and concise with ultimate impact
• Can allow multiple solutions
• Does it have the right context

Activity

1. Using a Problem Tree Analysis Framework
2. Using the Five Why’s problem solving framework
3. How to frame questions “How might we... so that we can...?”

SESSION 4: Systems Thinking for Complex Problems

When challenges are complex, it's essential to understand the interdependencies and ecosystems surrounding them. This session helps you map the broader system, uncover hidden relationships and identify small but strategic shifts that can lead to meaningful change.

• How can we map out how different elements of the system interact and see hidden relationships that may impact our challenge
• Identify leverage points: Find the key areas within a system where small changes can create significant improvements
• What are the unknowns about our challenge?
• Transformation Influence Model Overlay: Map where rolemodelling, rituals, skills and messaging could shift system dynamics and enable change

Activity

1. Using Systems Thinking to Map Ecosystems and System Interdependencies
2. Ignorance Mapping

DAY TWO | SOLVE CREATIVELY: FROM WIDE THINKING TO PROTOTYPES AND TESTING

SESSION 5: Ideation Part 1: Taking Thinking Wide

• Rules of engagement for divergent thinking
• Taking the team through a variety of different ‘stretch your thinking approaches’ or creative levers they can pull to shift their thinking. These include:
  • 99 Ideas
  • Creative Poaching
  • Different Perspectives
  • Disruptive Revolution and
  • Blindly Assumed Truths
  • Constraints thinking

Activity

Teams will work in groups throughout the morning and will also collaborate with other groups to provide a diversity of thought.

SESSION 6: Ideation Part SESSION 6 2 & Decision-Making

Exploring a variety of different ‘stretch your thinking approaches’ or creative levers they can pull to shift their thinking. These include:

• AI-Enhanced Brainstorm: Participants write a seed idea, input into GenAI, and evaluate what is useful, new or limiting
• SCAMPER

Activity

The Decision-Making Framework

• Deciphering all of the information
• Look for specific themes and specific insights
• What are the top 3 ideas you like
• What’s the most feasible, viable, desirable idea to pursue and prototype:
  • A desirable solution: one that your customer really needs
  • A feasible solution: building on the strengths of your current operational capabilities
  • A viable solution: with a sustainable business model
  • A socially responsible solution

SESSION 7: Prototyping to Learn, Refine and Evolve

• Rapid Prototyping and Testing: Ideas Do Not Live In A PowerPoint
• Introduction to prototyping:
  • A prototype is worth a thousand meetings
  • It creates something meaningful and tangible that engages all the senses
• Case studies of companies using rapid prototyping
• Introduction to fail fast and rapid experimentation
• Examples of prototypes and Minimum Viable Products
• How to create a prototype

Activity

1. Teams will create Rapid Prototypes to test
2. Introduction to Visual Storytelling

SESSION 8: Test Early, Test Often

• Introduction to user testing
• How to ask open ended questions that drive conversations
• Understanding the importance of a storyteller and observer when testing ideas
• How to interview and test with users
• How to avoid paralysis by analysis
• The importance of testing early and often with stakeholders
• How to embrace a more agile, rapid experiment way of working

Activity

Teams will go through 3–4 rounds of rapid testing activities.

DAY THREE | MAKE IT STICK: STORYTELLING, TEAM HABITS AND LEADING INNOVATION

SESSION 9: Making Innovation a Team Habit

• Why innovation fails to stick: events vs. habits
• Small habits that build a creative culture
• Weekly curiosity prompts
• Monthly retrospectives
• Quarterly small experiments

Activity

1. Audit your current team culture: What’s rewarded, ignored, punished
2. Design your team’s Innovation Cadence: Simple weekly, monthly and quarterly rituals

SESSION 10: Storytelling & Pitching Ideas That Stick

• Storytelling is a the heart of leading innovation and growing ideas
• Understand how to grab your audience’s attention
• Develop a simple structure for all presentations
• Understand how to have gravitas, presence and energy when presenting
• Understand the importance of storytelling and where and how to use it
• Never again kill your audience with death by PowerPoint

Activity

1. Craft a 2-minute Story and Pitch it
2. Present this to a panel of peers acting as investors, team members, executives:
   • Panel will give feedback that enables the idea to grow

SESSION 11: Leading for Innovation

• What innovative teams say about their leaders
• How to create psychological safety in practice
• Coaching questions that spark new thinking
• Leading through ambiguity and experimentation

Activity

1. Leadership Reflection: Am I a bottleneck or a booster?
   • Safety Language Practice: Leaders rehearse language that invites participation, responds to risk with curiosity and keeps options open
2. Friction Mapping: Teams identify where their idea will hit blockers inside the business, then brainstorm how to reduce resistance or work around them

SESSION 12: Bringing It All Together

• Each team member creates a personal innovation action plan to take what they have learnt forward
• What did we learn?
• What are we curious about?
• What surprised us?
• Where can we use this approach in our organisations?

Activity

1. Team-Centric Transformation Planner: Identify a real or imagined team and design the support systems, rituals, feedback loops and leadership behaviours needed to keep innovation moving.
2. Key Learnings & How can you use this approach in your organisation