Workshops
While serving as an innovation-evangelist at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, Steve taught hundreds of Googlers about the strategies, principles, and cultural frameworks required to embrace change and prioritize new ideas. Through a Story Arc Consulting Collaborative Brainstorming Workshop, Steve will help your team tackle it’s challenges using the same strategies and principles used by innovative brands like Google.
Who is this for?
Example use cases
Workshop Facilitation
Leadership teams, boards of directors, planning committees, small to mid-sized companies. Any group of people with a shared goal that could benefit from more creativity, more collaboration, and a chance to step back and re-think things.
We want our next board meeting, strategic planning sessions, or annual company meeting to be more exciting, more engaging, more collaborative, and to produce more ideas
We need to challenge our leadership team or our staff to think more ambitiously about the future and to be more comfortable thinking outside-the-box
Our organization exists in too many silos, and we need to break down walls and increase collaboration, especially between our leaders
Our team gets so busy that we rarely carve out time to take a step back, look at the big picture, and allow ourselves to question what we’re doing and the ways in which we do it
Every workshop is unique and highly dependent on your group and your goals. The exact structure, topics, and timing are usually determined through discovery phone calls. Here are some common components:
Structure
Workshop Rules
Goals and Expected Outcomes
Recent Successful Workshops
How Does It Work
The majority of our workshops run for 3-4 hours, but can fall anywhere from 90 minutes to 8 hours. Typically the first 45 minutes consists of a speech from Steve Lerch on the culture needed to drive innovation and embrace new ideas. This speech focuses on specific principles of Google’s innovation philosophy, principles that will be used during the brainstorming part of the program.
After the presentation, attendees are lead through series of brainstorming exercises, applying elements of the innovation framework to the goals and challenges facing the organization. Exercises move quickly, force open sharing of ideas, and push for maximum collaboration between everyone in the room.
Everyone in the room should be equally involved, empowered, and opinionated. Your title, team, and tenure are irrelevant for these few hours.
We prioritize quantity of ideas over quality. Refinement happens later. A half-baked, crazy idea is better than an unsaid idea.
Ask questions and challenge any possible appearance of “that’s the way we do it because that’s how we’ve always done it.”
You’re allowed to question things without having the answer. You’re allowed to suggest something needs fixing without knowing how to fix it
Generate a large quantity of new ideas
Foster and encourage increased collaboration and a healthy disregard for silos
Inspire the team to think more ambitiously, creatively, and to embrace new ideas
Give employees the license to challenge the status quo and to openly share ideas
Energize, excite, and empower your staff, team, leadership or board
Teach the team new tactics for brainstorming and strategic planning that can be used moving forward
Contact Us
StoryArcConsulting@gmail.com
202-643-4847