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Creative Thinking: Innovative Solutions to Complex Challenges

Learn how to grow a culture of creativity to innovate competitive solutions.

All Start Dates

  • Time

    8:30 AM – 4:30 PM ET

  • Length

    2 consecutive days

  • Cost

    $3,100
    Programs fill quickly — free cancellation up to 14 days prior

  • Registration Deadline

    April 22, 2025

  • Time

    8:30 AM – 4:30 PM ET

  • Length

    2 consecutive days

  • Cost

    $3,100
    Programs fill quickly — free cancellation up to 14 days prior

  • Registration Deadline

    July 8, 2025

Overview: Creative Thinking Skills Course

The tech breakthrough that makes smartphones irrelevant, a new viral ad campaign, your company’s next big revenue generator — ideas like these could be sitting in your brain; all you need are the creative thinking skills and strategies to pull them out.

This interactive program focuses explicitly on the creative thinking skills you need to solve complex problems and design innovative solutions. Learn how to transform your thinking from the standard “why can’t we” to the powerful “how might we.” Crack the code on how to consistently leverage your team’s creative potential in order to drive innovation within your organization. Explore how to build a climate for innovation, remove barriers to creativity, cultivate courage, and create more agile, proactive, and inspired teams.

You will leave this program with new ideas about how to think more productively and how to introduce creative thinking skills into your organization. You can apply key takeaways immediately to implement a new leadership vision, inspire renewed enthusiasm, and enjoy the skills and tools to tackle challenges and seize opportunities.

Innovation experts Anne Manning and Susan Robertson bring to this highly-interactive and powerful program their decades of experience promoting corporate innovation, teaching the art of creative problem solving, and applying the principles of brain science to solve complex challenges.

Who Should Take Creative Thinking Skills Training?

This program is ideal for leaders with at least 3 years of management experience. It is designed for leaders who want to develop new strategies, frameworks, and tools for creative problem solving. Whether you are a team lead, project manager, sales director, or executive, you’ll learn powerful tools to lead your team and your organization to create innovative solutions to complex challenges.

Benefits of Creative Thinking Skills Training

The goal of this creative thinking program is to help you develop the strategic concepts and tactical skills to lead creative problem solving for your team and your organization. You will learn to:

  • Retrain your brain to avoid negative cognitive biases and long-held beliefs and myths that sabotage creative problem solving and innovation
  • Become a more nimble, proactive, and inspired thinker and leader
  • Create the type of organizational culture that supports collaboration and nurtures rather than kills ideas
  • Gain a practical toolkit for solving the “unsolvable” by incorporating creative thinking into day-to-day processes
  • Understand cognitive preferences (yours and others’) to adapt the creative thinking process and drive your team’s success
  • Develop techniques that promote effective brainstorming and enable you to reframe problems in a way that inspires innovative solutions

All participants will earn a Certificate of Completion from the Harvard Division of Continuing Education.

Curriculum

The curriculum in this highly interactive program utilizes research-based methodologies and techniques to build creative thinking skills and stimulate creative problem solving.

Through intensive group discussions and small-group exercises, you will focus on topics such as:

  • The Creative Problem Solving process: a researched, learnable, repeatable process for uncovering new and useful ideas. This process includes a “how to” on clarifying, ideating, developing, and implementing new solutions to intractable problems
  • The cognitive preferences that drive how we approach problems, and how to leverage those cognitive preferences for individual and team success
  • How to develop—and implement— a methodology that overcomes barriers to innovative thinking and fosters the generation of new ideas, strategies, and techniques
  • The role of language, including asking the right questions, in reframing problems, challenging assumptions, and driving successful creative problem solving
  • Fostering a culture that values, nurtures, and rewards creative solutions

April Schedule

Day 1

  • Creative Challenges: A Team Sport
  • The Place to Begin: Reframe the Challenge

Day 2

  • Ideas on Demand
  • Building a Creative Organization

July Schedule

Day 1

  • Creative Challenges: A Team Sport
  • The Place to Begin: Reframe the Challenge

Day 2

  • Ideas on Demand
  • Building a Creative Organization

Instructors

  • Anne Manning

    Anne Manning

    Anne brings over 25 years of experience working with senior executives at Fortune 500 firms, providing counsel in strategy, marketing insights, communications, innovation, and creativity. Her work has focused on infusing marketing and communications planning with an empathetically based customer focus that results in long-term brand commitment and loyalty.
  • Susan Robertson

    Susan Robertson

    Susan is a senior faculty member at the Creative Problem Solving Institute, where she teaches and trains creative problem solving and innovative thinking. Her work includes designing innovation discovery processes, facilitating ideation sessions, customer insight and co-creation, and leading strategic meetings.

Instructors

  • Anne Manning

    Anne Manning

    Anne brings over 25 years of experience working with senior executives at Fortune 500 firms, providing counsel in strategy, marketing insights, communications, innovation, and creativity. Her work has focused on infusing marketing and communications planning with an empathetically based customer focus that results in long-term brand commitment and loyalty.
  • Susan Robertson

    Susan Robertson

    Susan is a senior faculty member at the Creative Problem Solving Institute, where she teaches and trains creative problem solving and innovative thinking. Her work includes designing innovation discovery processes, facilitating ideation sessions, customer insight and co-creation, and leading strategic meetings.
Mary Wells

I really enjoyed the way the instructors facilitated the program. The combination of theory and practical exercises was powerful and effectively reinforced the concepts.

Mary C. Wells, Ph.D.

Innovation and Educational Research, Director, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Certificates of Leadership Excellence

The Certificates of Leadership Excellence (CLE) are designed for leaders with the desire to enhance their business acumen, challenge current thinking, and expand their leadership skills.

This program is one of several CLE qualifying programs. Register today and get started earning your certificate.

Learn More