Leading Creatively

Course Overview

Innovation rarely fails for lack of ideas; it fails because leaders unintentionally kill the conditions ideas need. This three-day course focuses on the leader's role in creative work: framing problems worth solving, building psychological safety without losing rigour, running sessions that generate genuinely new options, and shepherding fragile ideas past the organisational immune system. Delegates practise on a live challenge they bring from work.

What You Will Achieve

• Frame problems in ways that open the solution space rather than narrowing it
• Create the conditions (safety, stimulus, constraint) under which teams generate better ideas
• Facilitate ideation sessions that go beyond the first obvious answers
• Evaluate ideas without crushing them prematurely
• Champion new ideas through organisational resistance to delivery

Who Should Attend

Leaders and managers responsible for improvement, product development or transformation, and anyone whose team is expected to innovate but keeps producing the same answers.

Course Outline

1. 01Why smart teams produce safe ideas: the leadership factor
2. 02Problem framing: the question determines the answers
3. 03Psychological safety with standards: both, not either
4. 04Ideation that works: structure, stimulus and wild cards
5. 05Selecting ideas: portfolio thinking over gut feel
6. 06Prototyping and cheap tests before big commitments
7. 07Navigating the organisational immune system
8. 08Your live challenge: pitch and peer review