FBI Workshop Recap & Reflect
I believe the best way to demonstrate your knowledge and understanding of anything is to teach it, which is why I designed and led a creativity, brainstorming, and innovation workshop in the main room of my fraternity house for any brother who wanted to participate. Understanding that this is a very busy week for many students, I tied to jam-pack the most amount of content in a twentyfive minute session so that my audience could grasp the broadest sense of the subject as possible because they don't come from an entrepreneurial background. The brochure you received was what I sent into my friend's fraternity's pages and groups--highlighting the concepts I wanted to cover with them. Attached is also the document I used to guide myself through the workshop.
I opened the workshop with a discussion asking everyone what they thought creativity was. Answers I received were "thinking outside of the box", "producing non-traditional ideas" and the like. I told them that creativity, especially in the realm of entrepreneurship, was something that is both novel and useful, that it creates value (tangible or intangible). I went on to tell them that not only is creativity a muscle, that it can be trained and strengthened, but that the people I personally believe to need it the most are those who think they need it least. Secondly, I touched on the elements of a creative mindset, which is essential to prime ourselves for creativity. Next I asked "How do we measure creativity?"; the immediate reply was that we couldn't, that creativity is subjective. From here I went on to explain how fluency, flexibility, originality, and novelty can be used to objectively measure creativity. To demonstrate this I had my audience
participate in the exercise where they had about a minute to list as many uses for a pen as they could think of, walking them through which ideas were fluent, flexible, etc. The next topic of my brief workshop was challenging the process. Although this was touched on in the leadership portion of class material, I believe that it deals a great amount with how we approach constraints to creativity. To demonstrate this I had them engage in the tennis ball exercise we did in class. I reflected with them on the exercise and how challenging the process and realizing that they could work around the constraints I gave them to artifact and elaborate on their method to improve. To finish the session I ran a post-it brainstorm exercise, stressing the importance of quantity and to not stop writing, followed by a brief about creative problem solving. (Below is a picture of the workshop)
(All members who were siting were participating in my workshop, please excuse the dancing intruder.)
MY BIG TAKE-AWAYS First, I now have a better appreciation of the organization required to plan and execute a workshop, even if it's only twenty-five minutes. I've always taken for granted the considerable behind-the-scenes work that goes into teaching and instructing. Secondly, I found it interesting upon reflecting on my workshop that even though I walked around a few times to everyone, I engaged the most with those who sat close to me. This is unrelated to my portfolio but I'll make a mental note to always sit closer to the professor or speaker. Last, creativity is about having fun and getting back to childhood. I was actually surprised to see how much fun I was able to get these hooligans to have in this brief workshop.