Half Day and Full Day Retreats/Workshops on Upside Down Thinking
These sessions would typically be in the late afternoon or evenings on the weekend. In this workshop, we will explore how Upside Down Thinking helps us think more clearly about the pressures in our organizations to maintain the status quo. I will share how thinking differently can challenge our most basic assumptions about the work we do, and how these assumptions can sometimes reinforce the very systems we are trying to change. Participants will spend time in dialogue, connecting and sharing their experiences, and will be challenged to consider how they can foster shared and collaborative visions of the future and how to make them come true.
In the daylong session, I blend together lecture and presentation with a variety of Upside Down Thinking table exercises, drawing upon my own innovations and experiences with Upside Down Thinking. Participants will be presented with some of the most disruptive propositions from various sectors to work through and learn from together. Through interactive exercises, participants will also work on disruptive propositions that resonate directly to their own situations.
Spend the day with me to experience and learn:
– Exploring Lateral Thinking, Integrative Thinking, Divergent and Convergent Thinking, Systems Thinking as well as the fundamentals of Upside Down Thinking and how it can add value to other ways of thinking collaboratively.
– Practical tools: learn practical tools for thought from the Upside Down Thinking toolbox, such as asking Wicked Questions, heretical propositions, and turning norms upside down to bring about disruptive innovation.
– The impact of groups and organizations: how organization and group dynamics impact our ability to think and change together
– How to approach problems as solutions in disguise: change your approach to problem solving by challenging our solutions by rephrasing them as problems
– Principles to guide thinking upside down in groups
– Addressing resistance in implementing a new way of thinking
– Applying Upside Down Thinking in a group dynamic: how to practice Upside Down Thinking as both a group participant and facilitator.
Each session is custom developed to connect to the context of work.
I have delivered workshops, daylong sessions, and key note addresses on Upside Down Thinking across Canada in the USA to poverty reduction groups, museum professionals, health professionals, community engagement practitioners, municipal staff, and human service organizations.
Happy to chat with you about how Upside Down Thinking can benefit your group.
Mark Holmgren 