Hello All,

Come join us for a rare and wonderful opportunity: a half day workshop in collaboration skills capacity building, and team innovation with well-known systems thinking and team skills capacity building instructor, Joe Laur of Seed Systems. Joe has offered transformation capacity building training for such well known companies as Nike, Shell, Ford, Interface.

Workshop: Harnessing the Power of Collaborative Design and Innovation: A Capacity Building Workshop for Strong Systems and Team Skills
When: Friday, April 4th, 2014, 9 - 2pm
Where: The Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC)
100 Bigelow St. Holyoke, MA 01040
To RSVP, and for more details, see the full listing:
http://bit.ly/1i1Vi0w

Our Focus:
• Grow your capacity in systems thinking, collaborative communication, and team innovation.

• Learn to balance the cycle of individual learning (personal mastery) and team learning (cross pollination, cross communication).

• Learn to preserve, even enhance relationships in challenging conversations.

• Introduction to Design Thinking
• Human happiness as core design principle

Collaboration is the paradigm changing factor for innovative business today. The book Wikinomics by Don Tapscott goes so far as to say, "A power shift is underway, and a tough new business rule is emerging: Harness the new collaboration or perish. Those who fail to grasp this will find themselves …cut off from the networks that are sharing, adapting, and updating knowledge to create value."

My preference is to see the opportunity in collaboration as the innovation power of "we". In a recent interview, IDEO CEO Tim brown describes what he calls the T shaped person:

"T-shaped people have two kinds of characteristics, hence the use of the letter “T” to describe them. The vertical stroke of the “T” is a depth of skill that allows them to contribute to the creative process. That can be from any number of different fields: an industrial designer, an architect, a social scientist, a business specialist or a mechanical engineer. The horizontal stroke of the “T” is the disposition for collaboration across disciplines. It is composed of two things. First, empathy. It’s important because it allows people to imagine the problem from another perspective- to stand in somebody else’s shoes. Second, they tend to get very enthusiastic about other people’s disciplines, to the point that they may actually start to practice them. T-shaped people have both depth and breadth in their skills." http://tinyurl.com/676bwur


We hope to see you there :)

Best,

Lisa