Want to be a more visionary and strategic thinker? How about increase your ability to generate and implement new ideas? Wildcard Thinking offers a number of interactive classes to build creativity and innovation, leadership and communication skills. Below are our most popular courses. We can also customize our material to meet your unique needs. We have the flexibility to offer courses in-person or virtually.

Creative Leadership

A majority of CEOs cite creativity as the most important leadership quality required to cope with the growing complexity of today’s workplace. Leaders must solve increasingly complex challenges that require new and different thinking. Creativity is a vital skill, yet leaders admit they lack the necessary knowledge to promote its growth.

In this class we will demystify creativity and explore ways to nurture, manage, and grow the creative capabilities of teams and organizations. You will learn how to foster a culture of innovation and develop the skills to capitalize on the creative and problem solving abilities within your organizations.

Leading Ideation: Tools and Techniques

In Tools and Techniques we dive deep into the Creative Problem Solving process. You will learn a structure and methodology for facilitating idea generation and problem solving sessions within your teams and organizations. You will walk away with a Swiss army knife of creative thinking tools and techniques for generating, evaluating, and strengthening ideas. You’ll also learn how to apply different tools to real challenges and practice facilitating. Perfect for team leaders, project managers, facilitators, trainers, and anyone looking for a better process to solicit ideas from others.

Storytelling

Storytelling and Delivery

Storytelling is one of our greatest gifts. We all know a great story when we hear one. But how many of us have forgotten how to tell a great story? Or our stories fall short? Or we don’t know the right moments to tell a story in a business setting? In this class we’ll focus on the basics of telling an effective story. You will learn how to identity the theme and purpose of your stories. You’ll learn an easy to remember structure for your stories that makes it faster to construct your narrative or tell an impromptu story. You will discover your own stories, opportunities to tell them and how to deliver them to an audience from 1 to 1,000. We’ll also look at how to use stories for openings, idea generation, strategic planning, visioning, prototyping and gaining buy-in. You will receive tailored feedback on your delivery style.

Coaching for Performance

“Coaching increases performance, productivity and job satisfaction at all levels.” – MIT Sloan

Do you have baby birds on your staff? Where they come to you and you solve their problems. You do the work. And in the end, their muscles for growth and change don’t develop. Our good intentions, driven by our desire to help or being too pressed for time, end up having the opposite effect we want which is for our people to grow and learn.

In Coaching for Performance we look at the mindset, toolset and coaching model for being an impactful coaching leader. This class looks at the skills you need to be a confident coaching manager and how to structure coaching conversations to help your people reach their best. You will walk away with a framework to apply immediately and practice coaching in 5 and 10 minute bursts.

Creativity Inside the Box

Blue Sky thinking and imagining ideal worlds are great for visioning and identifying where we want to go. But the realities of budget reductions, compliance, risk reduction, and time and resource constraints can make it a real challenge to be creative and think outside the box. These very real complexities require us now more than ever to think creatively and generate new ideas within the confines of our environment. Real innovation happens when vision and constraint intersect.

In this class we explore ways to embrace constraints and use them as a starting point for new thinking. Creativity doesn’t have to mean throwing out all the rules or pretending they don’t exist. We’ll get inside the box and learn how to problem-solve our way through the constraints we’re confronted with allowing us to get to innovative outcomes that work under our conditions.

Building Innovative Teams

Teams are crucial to the cultivation and implementation of new ideas. In this course we explore how to maximize the generation of new and useful ideas within your team. We uncover the secrets to creating a high performance, collaborative team that delivers breakthrough results. This course will show you how to develop team members and group dynamics, as well as the leadership skills necessary to motivate them. We’ll also delve into the attitudes and behaviors necessary to produce innovative solutions.

Design Thinking

Our customers are one of our most powerful allies for new ideas. They can help us identify the problems we need to focus on solving and lead to new insights on how to better deliver our products and services. They are an untapped, bountiful resource to help us improve.

In this course we use Design Thinking to put customers at the center of our work and generate creative strategies. We explore ways to engage customers and solicit rich, actionable feedback to improve products and services. You will learn how to transform your customers into your advocates, using them to generate new business leads and opportunities.

Master Facilitator

Are you ready to take your facilitation skills to the next level? The Master Facilitator class will help you hone your strengths and add new tools to your toolkit. Packed with dozens of facilitation tools and techniques this class truly is for the practitioner that wants to be legendary. You will practice leading tools for visioning, clarifying, idea generation and selection, developing solutions and gaining buy-in. You will receive hands on practice and detailed feedback and coaching to get even better.

Innovation Program Suite

The Wildcard Thinking innovation program is a suite of 4 courses. Each one targets a different part of the organization with different skills. The program is made up of a Fundamentals course for all members of the organization, an Advanced course to teach the innovation process, an Executives course which focuses on leaders and setting the climate and conditions for innovation and a Master Facilitator course to unleash and empower those that will lead the most complex problem solving challenges.

Project Managers

Project management is a delicate dance between managing change and delivering something new. Creativity is a necessity for newness, yet so are the realities of scope, timeliness, and budget. The good news is the two do not have to be mutually exclusive and there are ways to successfully leverage creative thinking skills with the details of project management. In an era of tighter deadlines, doing more with less, and increased complexity, project managers must now more than ever seek new and innovative ways to get the job done. In this course you will learn how to create the foundation for creative thinking within the projects you manage. You will discover how to tap into the creative talents of your teammates and blend creativity into the project delivery process. You will learn to foster the creative talents of your team and motivate them to achieve results. And you will walk away with new tools for solving project problems, influencing stakeholders, and inspiring the team that you can take with you from project-to-project.

Business Presentation Skills

How many of us have struggled with how to open a presentation? Or close it? Or structure the content to effectively persuade our audience? In this class you’ll learn how. You’ll be on your feet within the first hour of this class presenting and receiving feedback. You’ll learn a proven structure for presenting so that you can quickly build credibility with your audience and make your presentations stick.

LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®Method and Tools

The LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® methodology is a strategic and fun approach to building engagement, communication and problem solving. It has been used for more than 20 years to facilitate powerful conversations through the use of building and metaphor. When we use our hands in learning and exploration our thoughts and ideas tend to have greater detail, we can understand more and remember more easily. LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® methods can be applied to visioning, team development, storytelling, conflict, strategy, prototyping, case construction and event engagement.

Training from the Back of the Room

How many times have you sat through a training program or workshop where the instructor lectured at you the entire time? Or worse, read their Power Point slides to you? How well did that topic stick for you? Sitting still and being told information is one of the worst possible ways the brain learns. Training from the Back of the Room uses brain-based learning techniques to deeply engage learners in the material. Passive listeners become active learners. The Training from the Back for the Room workshop and modules are targeted to trainers and facilitators that want to transform their training sessions with dozens of instructional strategies to help their learners get more out their training. Participants walk away with a new toolkit of training tools, a roadmap for developing training sessions and a truly fun and interactive approach to changing the dynamics of how people learn.

Training from the Back of the Room

Custom Courses

Looking for something more specific and specialized for your organization? We can create custom courses to meet your needs. Start the conversation with us to see where we can make a difference.