Cre­ative Visual Break­through Training

 

Our pro­gram includes the following:

 

1. Ini­tial con­sul­ta­tion and assess­ment of company’s needs (free of charge)

1. 2. A 3-hour mini-session pro­vid­ing a hands-on expe­ri­ence that high­lights our training’s value and potential

2. (free of charge or a con­sul­ta­tion fee)

3. 3. A 2-day train­ing event that includes:

• Ini­tial brain­storm­ing – issue/problem/project/mission analysis

• Basic visual lan­guage edu­ca­tion for team mem­bers (no pre­vi­ous artis­tic skills necessary)

• Cre­ation of a fin­ished art­work (a 5′ by 7′ mural or larger depend­ing on the num­ber of participants

and wall size you have available).

• Ana­lyt­i­cal feed­back ses­sions dur­ing the artis­tic process to catch the right brain inspi­ra­tional idea run-off

• Analysis/discussion/brainstorming at the end based on look­ing at the fin­ished mural

1. 1. Hang­ing of the mural in the workplace

2. 2. 2 week ger­mi­nat­ing period

3. 3. A follow–up ses­sion (in per­son or online) in 2 weeks time to down­load ideas and develop an action plan

4. based on the process.

 

Expected ben­e­fits and results

 

 

Tan­gi­ble results

 

• New ideas and fresh solu­tions to increase com­pet­i­tive advan­tage in a chang­ing busi­ness environment

• Devel­op­ing new prod­ucts and processes

• Self-generated com­pany mural — a visual data­base of key val­ues, ideas, solu­tions and goals

• Pro­vid­ing a vision that inspires, moti­vates and is easy to relate to for all orga­ni­za­tional citizens

Intan­gi­ble results

1. 1. Orga­ni­za­tional level capa­bil­i­ties and results

• Exer­cis­ing and pro­vid­ing strate­gic lead­er­ship by deriv­ing full com­pet­i­tive ben­e­fit from the human

• cap­i­tal and its knowl­edge base

• Increas­ing pro­duc­tiv­ity by uti­liz­ing col­lec­tive intel­lect and its col­lec­tive capac­ity to gain and use knowledge

• Cre­at­ing an envi­ron­ment for knowl­edge to breed more knowl­edge and for ideas to build on each other

• Devel­op­ing social archi­tec­ture that gen­er­ates intel­lec­tual capital

• Out­think­ing and out­wit­ting com­pe­ti­tion by imple­ment­ing all of the above

1. 2. Team level skills/development

• Cre­at­ing a cul­tural glue that allows team mem­bers to share knowl­edge sets

• Mobi­liz­ing team’s effort around key strate­gic issues

• Releas­ing and nur­tur­ing people’s cre­ativ­ity

• Cre­at­ing work flows influ­enced by rela­tion­ships

• Pro­mot­ing team­work and a will­ing coor­di­na­tion of effort

• Build­ing a cul­ture of mutual respect

• Devel­op­ing self-regulating align­ment of cre­ative endeav­ors

• Sup­port­ing cre­ative con­flict resolution

1. 3. Indi­vid­ual skills/development

• Devel­op­ing flex­i­bil­ity and open­ness to change

• Devel­op­ing skills/attitude to engage in brand new tasks

• Learn­ing to con­nect to one’s own creativity

• Set­ting up a path­way to get into a cre­ative zone

• Tak­ing a “fresh look“ at exist­ing problems

• Loos­en­ing think­ing restraints, get­ting one’s mind “out of the box”

• Max­i­miz­ing employee engage­ment and grow­ing a self-directed work­force

• Build­ing a cul­ture of empow­er­ment and encour­ag­ing spon­ta­neous pro-social behavior.

Use of images and col­lab­o­ra­tive artis­tic process as an engine of cre­ative break­through in orga­ni­za­tional settings

 

Right and left brain dynamics

 

It is a well known fact that our brain has two hemi­spheres: left one is respon­si­ble for log­i­cal think­ing, abstract thought and con­cep­tual judg­ment, and the right one facil­i­tates asso­cia­tive think­ing and imag­i­na­tion. Roger Sperry, a Nobel Prize win­ner (1981) has con­ducted exten­sive research on the nature of this phe­nom­e­non while study­ing cor­pus colos­sum – an area of the brain that coor­di­nates the activ­ity between the two hemi­spheres. In 1973 he wrote: “The main theme to emerge… is that there appear to be two modes of think­ing, ver­bal and non­ver­bal, rep­re­sented rather sep­a­rately in left and right hemi­spheres respec­tively and that our edu­ca­tion sys­tem, as well as sci­ence in gen­eral, tends to neglect the non­ver­bal form of intel­lect. What it comes down to is that mod­ern soci­ety dis­crim­i­nates against the right hemisphere.”

Qual­i­ties and func­tions that are com­monly asso­ci­ated with the left brain are: words and lan­guage, com­pre­hen­sion, math and sci­ence, order/pattern per­cep­tion, detail ori­ented, real­ity based, forms strate­gies, prac­ti­cal and safe. The right brain is asso­ci­ated with: imag­i­na­tion, sym­bols and images, phi­los­o­phy and reli­gion, “big pic­ture” ori­ented, gen­er­at­ing mean­ing, feeling-based, spa­tial per­cep­tion, pos­si­bil­i­ties, risk taking.

In other words while the left hemi­sphere con­sti­tutes an ana­lyt­i­cal com­po­nent of our brain the right hemi­sphere func­tions more as a cre­ative com­po­nent. Because of this it is com­mon to think that sci­en­tists and busi­ness­men use mostly their ana­lyt­i­cal left hemi­sphere, while artists, writ­ers, etc – their cre­ative right hemi­sphere. In fact all of us draw on both brains depend­ing on the needs of the sit­u­a­tion that we find our­selves in.

 

Prob­lem solv­ing and cre­ative breakthrough

It is often for­got­ten or over­looked that most sci­en­tific and tech­no­log­i­cal break­throughs were not achieved by log­i­cal think­ing alone but came in sud­den burst of rev­e­la­tion like Archimedes’s famous “Eureka!” or Isaac Newton’s falling apple. When the solu­tion finally dawns upon us it hap­pens through a unique col­lab­o­ra­tion of left-brain analy­sis and right-brain asso­ci­a­tion and imagination.

Lat­est neu­ro­log­i­cal research has shown that it is the con­sis­tent shift­ing of gears between right brain and left brain, a rapid changeover between diver­gent and con­ver­gent ways of think­ing that allows a per­son to max­i­mize one’s inher­ent cre­ative potential.

In a recent arti­cle “Cre­ativ­ity cri­sis” (Newsweek, July 10, 2010) Po Bron­son and Ash­ley Mer­ry­man write:

“When you try to solve a prob­lem, you begin by con­cen­trat­ing on obvi­ous facts and famil­iar solu­tions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemi­spheres of the brain acti­vate together. Neural net­works on the right side scan remote mem­o­ries that could be vaguely rel­e­vant. A wide range of dis­tant infor­ma­tion that is nor­mally tuned out becomes avail­able to the left hemi­sphere, which searches for unseen pat­terns, alter­na­tive mean­ings, and high-level abstractions.

Hav­ing glimpsed such a con­nec­tion, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The atten­tion sys­tem must rad­i­cally reverse gears, going from defo­cused atten­tion to extremely focused atten­tion. In a flash, the brain pulls together these dis­parate shreds of thought and binds them into a new sin­gle idea that enters con­scious­ness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often fol­lowed by a spark of plea­sure as the brain rec­og­nizes the nov­elty of what it’s come up with.”

 

Our brain hemi­spheres may ful­fill sep­a­rate func­tions, but they are not sep­a­rate enti­ties. In order for cre­ative break­through to take place the two hemi­spheres must learn to pass the ball of thought/image back and forth to each other. The task log­i­cally for­mu­lated in ana­lyt­i­cal hemi­sphere is passed to the cre­ative hemi­sphere for imag­i­na­tive and asso­cia­tive probe and then comes back for fur­ther ana­lyt­i­cal development.

Unfor­tu­nately, this process of pass­ing infor­ma­tion back and forth between two brain hemi­spheres often seems to be beyond our con­trol. Or is it more acces­si­ble than we think? Can we try to pre­cip­i­tate cre­ative break­through and make it read­ily avail­able and commonplace?

 

Devel­op­ing a blue­print for revelation

The real issue here is that while left-brain activ­ity is eas­ily mea­sured and rou­tinely applied, right brain processes remain an unruly enigma in our cul­ture, emerg­ing in our aware­ness most often in a form of fan­tasy or dreams.

What if we tried to exter­nal­ize the whole process, give an outer expres­sion to the inner work­ings of the brain?

 

We believe that by link­ing cer­tain outer activ­i­ties to spe­cific men­tal tasks we can effec­tively begin to man­age the cre­ative break­through process itself.

Words and images, ver­bal and visual types of think­ing per­fectly exem­plify right-left brain paradigm.

Our approach is based on a step-by step process of alter­nat­ing ver­bal left-brain ana­lyt­i­cal tasks and then trans­lat­ing them into a visual lan­guage by involv­ing our cre­ative and imag­i­na­tive brain com­po­nent in a hands-on artis­tic process while we are search­ing for solu­tion to a prob­lem at hand. This approach could be applied to any type of prob­lem solv­ing – prac­ti­cal or eso­teric, tech­no­log­i­cal or psy­cho­log­i­cal, busi­ness or private.

Our method is specif­i­cally designed to unlock and fully opti­mize left-right brain syn­ergy in order to facil­i­tate cre­ative break­throughs in groups and orga­ni­za­tional set­tings, thus mak­ing it a poten­tially invalu­able inno­va­tion tool for busi­ness development.

This col­lab­o­ra­tive artis­tic process not only lev­els the play­ing field for every cre­ative con­trib­u­tor involved but also devel­ops new path­ways for the cre­ative energy to flow between the mem­bers of the group. Most impor­tantly the result­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive artwork/mural serves as a col­lec­tive right brain repos­i­tory, a com­mon imag­i­na­tion data­base. It allows every per­son on the team to draw upon every­one else’s images and asso­ci­a­tions to suc­cess­fully come up with a new idea and an unex­pected solu­tion to the prob­lem at hand. Images have power to encode, store and quickly release infor­ma­tion of great den­sity  — a few moments of look­ing at a mural image can pack a punch equal to read­ing of a 50-page report.

 

Col­lab­o­ra­tive mural and teambuilding

“We are all angels with only one wing, we can only fly while embrac­ing each other.”

Luciano De Crescenzo

The mural also becomes a pow­er­ful moti­vat­ing force for the team, a sym­bolic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the team’s mis­sion cre­ated by team mem­bers them­selves, a con­tin­u­ous source of inspi­ra­tion and organization’s ral­ly­ing cry.

The themes for the art process can be the company’s mis­sion and vision, cur­rent and future projects, any issue or prob­lem that is chal­leng­ing the orga­ni­za­tion at the moment such as pur­suit of growth, inno­va­tion, prod­uct devel­op­ment or prod­uct line exten­sions that pro­vide cus­tomers with an addi­tional value.

All par­tic­i­pants get their own real estate on this mural in order to express their thoughts/associations on a spe­cific theme. They can also express their par­tic­u­lar vision, involve­ment, poten­tial con­tri­bu­tion and desired per­sonal growth within the con­text of this subject.

Dur­ing this process all par­tic­i­pants look at each other work, get inspired, share and inter­change their work­spaces respect­fully with each other in order to arrive at a seam­less pic­ture and a coher­ent and uni­fied work of art.

Many years of our expe­ri­ence show that this unusual envi­ron­ment and an unfa­mil­iar way to express them­selves allows par­tic­i­pants to move “out of box” and to get into a very open state of cre­ative flow. This state is very enjoy­able and it allows peo­ple to have a lot of fun while work­ing together on a com­mon task. It also serves as pow­er­ful tool for resolv­ing con­flicts that may have been sim­mer­ing at the work­place. An unusual com­mon task (paint­ing a mural) releases the under­ly­ing ten­sions and pro­vides a pow­er­ful con­text and impe­tus to achieve a mutu­ally accept­able con­flict res­o­lu­tion. One of the many intan­gi­ble yet valu­able out­comes of this train­ing is a sig­nif­i­cant increase of trust and mutual respect in the work­ing envi­ron­ment. The results of each participant’s cre­ative con­tri­bu­tion are clearly vis­i­ble to every­one – they are right there on the wall. This is why it is imper­a­tive for the mural to be dis­played at the work­place. Not only does it pro­vide unex­pected solu­tions and gen­er­ates new ideas, it also reminds peo­ple of a shared cre­ative and fun experience.

We feel that it is very ben­e­fi­cial to have a 3–4 hours art ses­sion be repeated every 3 months (pos­si­bly even on the same mural) in order to inte­grate new devel­op­ments and new infor­ma­tion into organization’s visual sto­ry­board. It also refreshes and rein­forces a feel­ing of open cre­ativ­ity and col­lab­o­ra­tion between the team members.