There is an opening waiting for you and your team.
Case Examples
What do our services look like in real life? Here are some case examples:
Leadership Development | Executive Coaching | Capacity Building
Emerging leaders need practice, guidance, and a chance to show their stuff. When Opening Creativity works with groups over time, we can create chances for aspiring leaders to work alongside us. When working with a decades-old nonprofit with about 50 staff, five staff members volunteered to work closely with Opening Creativity. This allowed the volunteers a deeper role in interpreting learnings about the organization, choosing ways to engage with the organization, and facilitating activities with the larger group. These leaders helped tailor the project to speak to the culture, history, and present of the group. Our joint work led to deep trust and openness during a workshop just as the group was embracing a new phase of organizational life, and generated pride among the volunteers for their roles in helping the trust and openness emerge.
Facilitation for Group Resolution of Critical Issues
There are clues to your group's greater future all around. It is easy (even necessary) to tune them out, to get work done. Yet from time to time, it is useful to look at the clues together, to see what is really going on. Learning to use this skill (even frequently) helps teams do their best work. When working with a business team, after engaging individually with members, Opening Creativity facilitated a fun exercise. The purpose was to discover some clues about how the group could create a better future for itself and its customers. In the exercise, the group had to achieve a goal with some limiting rules. After the laughter and fun died down, we looked together at what happened. Who took charge? Who stood back? Who honored the rules? Who transformed the rules? And why? In time, the group found a key pattern: some people were giving a lot to the team, letting their own work slide, and some were focused on their own work, letting the team slide. This imbalance was affecting morale and the customers noticed. This drove away business. Daily choices that go unnoticed can impact business and organizational issues. By bringing choices to the surface in a low-stakes atmosphere, groups can see their choices and actions anew, and relate them to the results they are getting (for better or worse). Each situation requires a unique approach, and this is one example of tackling an issue from an indirect route: bubbling up key issues through a fun exercise, so the group can relax, notice things together, reflect, and choose to shift its actions and results.
Discovery of Emerging Visions and Strategic Agendas In working with a decades-old credit union with a brand new leader, Opening Creativity partnered with a team of consultants to identify dynamics holding the organization back from achieving its optimal performance. Following a series of interviews with credit union employees, our consulting team designed an approach to engage the employees in exploring our findings together. After a collaborative workshop, the members showed the new leader a vision of a new desired culture, inspiring the leader to see her employees in a whole new light. She had a new vision of what was possible and what the employees needed from her and from the organization to develop their talents and potential, and to serve their customers better, attracting more revenue to the credit union.
Participatory Processes | Consensus Building
In working with an alumni group, Opening Creativity engaged alternately with individuals and the group to discover and resolve key issues. The group was divided in its goals and priorities. Some members felt a strong need for more active engagement in the community. Others had a preference for continued investment in the group's internal development. During an initial group discussion, the tension was palpable. We later explored the issues one-to-one and as a group using a range of methods appropriate to the group, to help open possibilities and release the ideal direction for the group. By the time we held our final session together, tension was entirely replaced with delight and cohesion around the chosen direction.
Action Planning | Implementation | Evaluation In working with an environmental nonprofit seeking to ramp up its use of evidenced-based planning and evaluation, Opening Creativity worked with the group and individual members to assess organizational readiness for this evolutionary step. Following some engagement to strengthen relationships and strategic clarity, Opening Creativity worked with relevant staff to identify concrete issues and steps forward. This work led the organization to modify its procedures in maintaining data systems, to support greater agility and efficiency in using data, analysis, and feedback in its strategic planning and evaluation. Opening Creativity stays in contact to discuss how the work has impacted the organization, how the implementation is proceeding, and what is next for the organization.
Opening Creativity is a skillful partner in all stages of helping your organization or initiative grow and achieve results you desire. Contact us today.
s u p p o r t i n g s a f e s p a c e s a n d t r u s t - b u i l d i n g f o r p o w e r f u l r e s u l t s
