Corporate Training By Zack Academy - Thinking Outside the Lines

Why Should You Take The Thinking Outside the Lines Workshop?

Thinking Outside the Lines is a powerful one-day workshop guaranteed to get you thinking differently. This intensive workshop was made for professionals like you — key decision makers whose organizations are counting on them for both the vision and the strategic thinking skills crucial to every organization's ongoing success.

This workshop will teach you invaluable thinking tools and techniques that lead to true breakthrough solutions. It's a no-nonsense, results-focused day of training guaranteed to help you find better ways to approach the real-world problems you face every day.You'll learn how to evaluate team members' ideas in a way that encourages — rather than squashes — their creative processes. You'll be amazed at what your people are capable of producing once you show them how to explore in new directions!

Course Objectives:

• Break unproductive thinking habits that hold you back
• Tap into — and build upon — the potential of every idea
• Avoid costly mistakes using "what if" thinking
• Challenge old assumptions about how your organization "must" run
• Empower your people to perform at higher levels by using new thinking techniques
• Become a true leader who nourishes new ideas

Syllabus

Flexing Your Creative Thinking Muscles to Meet Today"s Complex Leadership Challenges:

• What creativity is – and isn"t – and why it"s a crucial leadership tool today
• It starts with you: The 10 Rules of Creative Leadership
• Thinking about how you think: Vertical vs. lateral thinking and convergent vs. divergent thinking
• Automatic filters that affect your perception of the world and the way you think
• Proven techniques for thinking more clearly and with greater focus in a world increasingly full of distractions

PowerThinking Tools for Moving Beyond "The Way It"s Always Been Done":

• Why it"s crucial to challenge boundaries you once took for granted ... and the techniques to do it
• The ABCs of PowerThinking – your ticket to "thinking outside the lines"
• Understanding why negative thinking kills ideas, keeps you stuck, and reinforces the status quo
• Habitual barriers to positive thinking
• The importance of replacing "it can"t be done" with an "anything"s possible" attitude – and how to spread it throughout your organization

Getting Outside the Lines With Creative Problem Solving:

• Pitfalls of problem solving – and steps for avoiding them
• Sidestep typical thinking traps that prevent you from reaching optimal solutions
• Critical steps of strategic thinking that guarantee your action plan succeeds
• Anchoring: What it is, how it can help you – and how it can hurt
• Using the "Why 5 Tool" to determine what"s really important to you

Supercharge Your Creative Decision-Making Skills:

• Examine the thought patterns you use to make decisions – learn how they help you and how they hold you back
• Dabbler, Obsessor, Hacker, Master: What"s your decision-making style?
• 3 basic ground rules for making stronger decisions
• Framing: How you look at a decision determines the degree of your success
• Use "what if" thinking to predict decision outcomes

Generating Ideas That Turn Problems Into Opportunities:

• Get out of "stuck-in-a-rut" thinking and learn to promote innovative breakthroughs
• Discover where your sparks for new ideas originate ... and where to find your richest sources of innovations
• Paradigms: Where to look for the next generation of breakthrough ideas
• Brain-linking, clustering, mindmapping, and other brainstorming tools: Tricks for generating lots of ideas quickly
• Creating a "safe" working environment where creativity and new ideas can flourish

Putting Creative Ideas Into Action – for Unprecedented Results!

• How to tell the difference between a great idea and a lousy one – it may not be as obvious as you think
• Accurately plot the outcome you expect on the Scale of Likelihood – an essential step before the final "OK" or "no go"
• Strategies for keeping bureaucracy from killing innovation
• Leadership challenge: How to implement innovative ideas in a world that is still clinging to old habits and methods