Innovation Management and Risk-Taking

Managing Innovation:
Optimizing the Power of New Ideas

Innovation management is a powerful and practical way to create value by selecting and optimizing the best new ideas—both for improvement and for radical change in products, processes, positioning, or paradigm.

In Managing Innovation participants will learn to incorporate innovation management skills and processes into their jobs by absorbing the results of research on exceptionally innovative organizations and put that knowledge to work through structured activities, cases, and skill practice.

Intelligent Risk-Taking:
From Vision to Action

Today’s rapidly changing business environment challenges us to make highly risky decisions more quickly than ever. Innovation and entrepreneurial activities always require risk.

The Intelligent Risk-Taking workshop is designed to help move ides from vision to action. In this program, participants learn a model which will enable them to become more creative, innovative, and successful by making better risk-taking decisions for themselves and their organizations.

Creating a Culture for Risk and Innovation:
A Guide for Leaders

It is not enough to encourage employees to take risks; your organization must communicate clearly how it will support innovators who take intelligent risks. In this program, leaders and managers learn how to modify aspects of the culture so employees receive consistent and positive messages about risk-taking and innovation.

Applied Creativity
Solving Problems and Responding to Opportunities

The foundation of individual, team, and organizational creativity is a creative attitude. There are many practical tools and methods for putting that attitude to work on real individual, team, and organizational challenges.In this program, participants will learn the tools and processes that will enable them to apply their own and others’ creativity in solving persistent problems and responding to business opportunities.

Debate, Negotiation & Conflict Resolution

Constructive Debate
Building Better Ideas

To be successful as global competitors, leaders in today’s organizations must establish and maintain an environment that supports the open exchange and exploration of ideas, leading to fuller participation, greater innovation, and better decisions.

In this two-day seminar, participants use challenging and controversial issues from their own organizations to develop their skills for constructive discussion and debate. They also learn to establish the conditions that encourage constructive debate and to eliminate those conditions that prevent potentially useful ideas from getting a hearing or allow poorly thought-through ideas to be implemented.

Constructive Negotiation:
Building Agreements that Work

To get ahead in today’s complex organizations, there is one skill that is critical to success—the ability to negotiate. Rather than taking an adversarial/competitive approach to negotiation, this program approaches negotiation as a constructive activity that is intended to meet the needs of all parties. Constructive Negotiation uses the metaphor of designing and constructing a building to learn a positive, productive way of thinking about, planning for and implementing negotiations.

Conflict: From Prevention to Resolution

Conflict can create problems in work productivity and alignment, or it can be used positively to take advantage of diverse perspectives and promote creativity and innovation. This program enables a better understanding of conflict sources and provides methods to take advantage of differences among team members rather than escalating them into unproductive conflict.

Building Working Relationships:
Constructive Engagement, Negotiation, and Conflict Management

In today’s organizations, we are part of a web of relationships within, across, between, and among many teams and organizations. These relationships must develop quickly and productively to allow for high trust and creative collaboration.

Building Working Relationships offers participants a rich variety of tools and processes to prevent, manage, and resolve conflict and to build strong and lasting agreements. Participants will learn to build effective working relationships with colleagues, managers, vendors, customers, and sponsors while preventing unnecessary conflict in working relationships by negotiating proactively.

Leadership Development

Puzzles, Mysteries, and Muddles:
Taming the Wild Things that Keep You Up at Night

One of the fundamental functions of any organization is to solve problems. In this workshop, we take a deeper look at the components of effective problem solving, and propose a four-phase approach. During this workshop, we will take a deep dive into exactly how to make your problem solving efforts more precise, efficient, and effective.

In our model, problem solving is a tool for translating intention into action, responding to the unpredicted, and making the most of limited resources. Done well, effective problem solving identifies and targets the right approach, level of effort, and resources to achieve the desired result.

Strategic Thinking:
Leadership Practices for Innovative Organizations

The dynamic and innovative organization requires leaders who can think strategically, who can make intelligent decisions based on new and emerging information while keeping the long-term vision in mind.

In this one-day intensive workshop, participants will have the opportunity to work with a variety of tools, applying them to a strategic challenge or opportunities in their own organization. They will also learn how and when to apply different types of thinking—systems thinking, critical thinking, and creative thinking—to various problems and opportunities.

Inspirational Leadership:
Encouraging Others to Do Great Things

Using the “stone soup” metaphor from folk literature, this powerful, experiential program provides participants with the insights and skills to inspire team members to believe in the extraordinary work they can do together if everyone contributes and builds the vision of success.

Participants will learn and practice key skills for inspiring others and then select a project and form action-learning teams to apply what they have learned in a way that helps create an inspiring culture within their organization.

Consulting on the Inside
Consulting on the Inside Walking the Line, Building Your Practice

Professionals from many different disciplines now serve as internal consultants to leaders, managers, and teams in their organizations. An internal consultant’s ability to influence strategy, tactics, decisions and behavior is based both on expertise and relationships. Consulting on the inside requires walking a fine line between being an insider with knowledge of the culture and the business and an outsider with a more objective view and broad knowledge.

In this workshop, based on the book, Consulting on the Inside: A Practical Guide for Internal Consultants by Beverly Scott and B. Kim Barnes (ASTD Press, 2011), participants will develop a greater understanding of their role, the consulting process, and how to use specific skills and tools to create an effective and successful internal consulting practice.

C.O.A.C.H.
for Peak Performance

Today, the most effective organizations are learning organizations. In a learning organization, individuals and teams are able to adapt to continually changing environments, act decisively while in uncharted territory, uncover opportunities where others see only chaos, and perform at their best when the stakes are highest. To meet these challenges and sustain high performance in today’s competitive environment, an organization must create a culture that promotes and supports learning and coaching at all levels and in any direction. C.O.A.C.H. For Peak Performance offers the coaching skills needed to inspire others to high performance.

Facilitating Forward:
Guiding Others Toward Results

Facilitating Forward is a skill-development program for project managers who need to facilitate meetings of their team and other groups of people in order to achieve buy-in and accomplish results. In this highly experiential program, participants will learn the fundamentals of facilitation including observation, communication, and intervention. They will also learn how and when to move between the roles of leader and facilitator.

Mastery of Change
Thriving in Uncertain Times

This program offers sophisticated tools for leaders in organizations contemplating or experiencing significant changes. In this two-day workshop, managers and supervisors learn to understand the impact of change in an organization and how to take action that will reduce resistance, stress and conflict, and accelerate the acceptance and implementation of large-scale change.

From Expert to Trainer:
Skills for Leading Learning Sessions

This lively and intensive two-day workshop provides a short course for new or occasional trainers in helping others learn new skills and practices. Participants will discover how to transfer skills or change behavior rather than merely presenting information.

This workshop is designed to model effective training techniques, using the same approaches, structures, and methods that are being taught. Participants learn how to offer information in a credible and engaging way, facilitate discussions, and design effective skill practice sessions and job aids.

Other Programs & Services

Leading Global and Virtual Teams
Succeeding Across Boundaries

In the 21st century, the concept of “place” is fast disappearing. The worldwide web is spawning global work teams that cross all sorts of geographic and cultural boundaries.

Barnes & Conti’s program, Leading Global and Virtual Teams: Succeeding Across Boundaries, gives team leaders the skills they need when working across boundaries of time, distance, and culture.

Executive Development

Executive Coaching
One-to-one or small group coaching supports senior managers and executives in decision-making, planning, and implementation.

Action Learning
Action Learning is a learn-by-doing leadership education concept in which participants take on long-term problems or opportunities which are designed to give them a chance to learn and use specific skills that the organization wants them to gain.

Types of services available:

• Process and Meeting Facilitation
• Leadership Coaching
• Process Analysis and Design
• Change Management Consulting
• Team Development/Team-Building/New Team Start-up
• Train-the-Trainer Design and Delivery
• Custom Design