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This course is designed to provide leaders and professionals with a set of transformational tools and techniques to help them maximize their own and their team’s creative potential in a strategic context. Its starting-point is self-discovery: participants will work on the inside first and then focus outwards to impact on the world of business.
The focus will be on thinking in different ways. Participants should be prepared to move out of their comfort zone and experiment with new ways of creating and communicating an inspiring leadership vision.

The course will help demystify the frequently-misunderstood concept of ‘strategy’. Whilst focusing on the analytical disciplines on which successful strategy is based, it centers on strategic planning as a value-adding process which harnesses the leader’s and the team’s ability to combine analysis with creative thinking and enables ideas and plans to be nurtured through to reality.

· Demonstrating how to balance analytical and creative thinking in plans and decisions

· Understanding how to discover and focus the creative capabilities of teams and individuals

· Understanding the linkage between operational and strategic management

· Aligning your own responsibilities and objectives with the strategy of your organization

· Improving personal leadership and management competencies

By the end of this course delegates will be able to:

• Demonstrate innovative methods for harnessing others’ creative potential
• Communicate your vision in refreshing and engaging ways
• Define the concepts of ‘strategy’ and ‘strategic plans’
• Understand and explain visionary thinking as part of the strategic process and apply strategic planning to your own management issues
• Place your own part of the organization within the overall context of corporate strategy
• Gain confidence in managing your own contribution to strategic implementation

Senior Management Professionals, Team Leaders, Supervisors and All Professionals who are responsible for driving company growth by creating or eliciting new ideas and paradigms, anyone who wants to forge innovative approaches to communications, or to human resource and training managers searching for breakthrough ideas and tools they can use to harness the creativity in others within their organization

Creative Problem-Solving

· Leadership Reality Assessment

· Leadership Vs. Management

· Understanding Our Brain Function

· Myths of Creativity

· The limitations of the rational

· Divergent approaches to problem-solving

· Letting go of logic

· Analogous thinking modes

· Convergent and divergent modes

Overcoming Personal Blockers to Creativity

· Sigmoid Curve - Lifecycle Model

· Continuous Improvement

· Breakthrough step change

· Self-awareness and the nature of the ego

· Personal goal alignment

· Adaption and innovation: personal preferences for creating meaning

· Exploring attitudes to risk

· Left- and right-brain thinking

Developing the Vision Creatively

· Six thinking hats

· Using differing thinking styles

· JoHari’s window

· The business plan process & creating a vision

· Harnessing the power of the team

· Organizational culture and its influence on innovation

· Letting go of the ego

· Working with different creative preferences

Communicating the Vision Creatively

· The 7 Step Creative Process

· Models of communication

· Viral visioning

· Authenticity and trust

· Creativity tools, techniques & strategy

· Letting go of the vision

· Leading without directing

· Possible leadership beliefs

From Ideas to Action: Creativity and Change

· Motivation - Hierarchy of Needs

· Overcoming organizational barriers to creativity and change

· Nurturing a learning environment

· Is Money a motivator?

· Personality Profiling

· Building a creative consensus

· Engaging stakeholders creatively

· Influencing and motivating through change

Strategic Thinking and Business Analysis

· What are strategy and strategic planning?

· Why are strategy and strategic planning important?

· What are the main conceptual frameworks?

· External analysis - understanding and analysing business attractiveness - macro environmental factors, growth drivers, competitive forces, market dynamics

· Benchmarking your own strategic position/competitor analysis

· Analysing customers

· “Thinking backwards from the customer”

· Mini-case on importance of external analysis

Internal Analysis and Fsion of Analyses into Strategic Options

· The interface of external and internal analysis

· Internal analysis: financial

· Internal analysis; non-financial

· The concept and practicalities of the “balanced scorecard”

· Diagnosing strategic problems and opportunities

· Fusion of analyses into strategic choices - SWOT and the strategy matrix

· Case examples of strategic choice

· Mini-case on importance of internal analysis

Strategic Plans and the Relevance of Alliances and Joint Ventures

· Review of the tools used so far

· The content of a strategy: avoiding “paralysis by analysis”

· Putting a strategic plan together – the 5-page framework

· A real-life example of a business strategy/strategic plan

· Strategies for alliances and joint ventures

· Example of best practice in alliances and joint ventures

· Introduction and briefing for the main case study

· First-phase group work on the main case study

Global Strategy, Teambuilding and the Management of Internal Communication

· The essence of globalization and global strategy

· Globalization – the strategic dimension

· Globalization – the organizational dimension

· Globalization – the human dimension

· How to build and manage a strategic planning team

· Communicating strategy through the organization

· Gaining your team’s commitment and buy-in to the strategy

· Second-phase work on the main case study

Strategic Implementation and Getting the Value out of Strategy

· Final-phase work on the main case study

· Group presentations of the main case study

· Effective execution - converting strategic analysis and planning into action

· Linking strategy with operational objectives

· Implementation – getting practical things done

· Strategic planning of your own career

· Creating tomorrow’s organization out of today’s organization

· Conclusion - the corporate and individual value of strategic thinking