15 Foundations for Facilitating Creativity at Work - Michelle James

For the past several years, I've offered an annual Creative IStock_000005391301Medium Facilitation Program based on universal principles of creativity; education, research and application of creative process; and, most significantly, lessons learned and insights gleaned from the trial and error of facilitating creative process with hundreds of individuals and organizations over the past 12 years. (An ongoing exploration, with each iteration I refine the program). It requires a different focus, skill set, way of being and "container creation" than facilitating analytical processes. Below are some of the many principles and practices I've learned or discovered. Take what resonates and leave the rest :-)

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Time to Retire Strategic Planning and Adopt Innovation Strategy - Kamal Hassan

It’s almost that time of year again. Strategic planning teams all over the world will gather behind closed doors in a vain attempt to predict the future – except for the visionary ones who are saying “Enough!” They have realized that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is, well, simply crazy. Remember the first James Bond movie you ever saw? Regardless of who was playing 007, you couldn’t help but be swept up as he outgunned and outsmarted the bad guys and saved the day. Now think of the last James Bond movie you saw. Did it give you the same thrill? Or did you almost fall asleep? It’s not the actor, or the mind-numbing car chases and explosions to blame. It’s the fact that we’ve seen it all before, year after year, we know how it ends. We’re left feeling vaguely unsatisfied, hoping for something more substantial.

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Dramatic Breakthrough in Strategic Planning - New and Improved Innovation Blog Site:

Deer Mouse_ John Good -NPS Photo It's been said (by poet Robert Burns) that, "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley" (since he was a Scot writing in 1785, what he meant was that the plans go often awry). Regardless your language, you may have noticed this pattern yourself when working with innovation teams to put together compelling plans of action. After years of research and number crunching, the results are in on a new technique that results in a dramatic improvement in the effectiveness of strategic planning and goal implementation.

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Missing the Situation Leads to Optimism Among Powerful « The Situationist

Power leads to greater errors in forecasts, according to new research led by social psychologist Dr Mario Weick at the University of Kent. The research, to be published by the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, shows that when people feel powerful they become more optimistic and less accurate in predicting the completion time of forthcoming tasks. The research examined for the first time the planning behaviour of powerful people and found that power drastically reduced the accuracy of forecasts with error rates soaring up to 70%. Dr Weick, a Research Fellow at the University’s School of Psychology, explained: ‘Time is a crucial factor in people’s everyday lives. Whether they are teachers, policy makers or engineers, people routinely plan their work and estimate the time it will take to accomplish tasks. Interestingly, people often underestimate the time it takes to accomplish tasks. This bias is known as the planning fallacy and derives from a too narrow focus on the envisaged goal. The more people focus on what they want

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Strategic planning: Three tips for 2009

Even in these tumultuous times, strategic planning doesn’t have to be an exercise in anxiety—or futility. APRIL 2009 • Renée Dye, Olivier Sibony, and S. Patrick Viguerie Source: Strategy Practice & McKinsey Quarterly Strategic-planning season has arrived for many companies, and it couldn’t be more different than it has been in years past. Gone are the days of linear trend-extrapolation exercises that produce base, upside, and downside cases. Strategists, now facing the most profoundly uncertain times in their careers, are creating disaster scenarios that would have been unthinkable until recently and making the preservation of cash integral to their strategies.

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