Creative Problem Solving Institute 2026

This Immersion is designed for experienced CPS practitioners ready to deepen their impact in organizations. Day 1, Tools Off the Beaten Path, explores underutilized convergent tools to strengthen decision-making and group alignment. Days 2-4, Leading Change with Agility, Versatility, and Creativity, focus on what teams create (product), the environments they work in (place), and the people and processes that shape collaboration. Through hands-on application and real-world challenges, participants will learn to diagnose team dynamics, recognize conditions that support creativity, and apply CPS as a unifying engine across ways of working. This is a practical, interactive experience for leading creative work that delivers results.

Days 2 - 4: Leading Change with Agility, Versatility, and Creativity - Michael Ackerbauer, PhD, and Christa Heydt-Hernandez
Every organization has a rhythm. Some teams find it and produce work they didn't know was possible. Others grind against each other and call it culture. The difference isn't luck — it's whether leaders can read the signals their teams are already sending and respond with the right move at the right time. This three-day immersion adapts a three-week graduate course into a hands-on practitioner experience. Across three 3.5-hour sessions, we'll work the creative systems that shape what gets built, where creativity can breathe, and how people actually collaborate when the work gets hard. Day 2 opens with the product of creativity: what we're here to make, how innovation actually happens in organizations, and why most change efforts stall before they start. Day 3 turns to place: the climate, culture, and psychological conditions that either invite creative work or quietly shut it down. Day 4 lands on the person and process: how cognitive preferences, emotional intelligence, and creative problem solving become the substrate underneath agile, design thinking, and every other framework you're already using. You'll leave able to:

• Diagnose where your team spends its collaborative energy, and where it doesn't
• Recognize the climate signals that predict creative outcomes before they appear in results
• Apply Creative Problem Solving as the integrative engine beneath your existing ways of working

Bring a challenge from your own context. We'll work it together.

Step into a high-energy, hands-on series designed to expand both your creative skillset and your facilitation toolbox. Through playful methods and real-time practice, participants will build practical tools while strengthening their ability to guide groups with confidence, presence, and flow. Experience what it means to learn by doing as you explore approaches that spark collaboration, deepen thinking, and elevate group outcomes.

Days 1 & 2: Playology: What’s Your Next Strategic Play®?
Why is Adult Play so important? How we play is directly linked to how we learn, think, work, feel, perform, and interact with others. What you learn in play you remember for life!

This immersion program includes all the bricks, cogs, and wheels found in a LEGO®facilitator’s play chest! We have strategically blended: Six Bricks, LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® methods, Playsonality™, Now What the Duck, and LSP 3D Diagnostic Cards into one complete two-day program so you can sample a variety of different programs for different user groups. Think of it like an assorted box of chocolates.

This is a facilitated thinking and communications technique. Our Playology program draws on extensive research from the fields of business, organizational development, psychology, and learning. Using hand-brain knowledge, we will share the processes that surface information, explore ideas, create better options, develop deeper knowledge, and identify solutions faster with 100% engagement.

You will walk away with new insights about the power of play and how we all use play daily to build engagement and resilience.

Are you looking for a session that will:

• Help you unpack the value of play at work and discover the ROI of play?
• Access the Playsonality© app to decode your play style?
• Conduct a deep dive into how play formulates our identity?
• Teach you new ways to stimulate powerful conversations?
• Supplement your creative program with engaging activities that people will remember?
• Give you new tools and techniques for your facilitator’s play chest?
• Explore how play paves the way to the flow zone, where we do our best thinking?

Learning Objectives:

• Add bricks and directives to your workshops to improve engagement
• Experience the power of manipulatives with all age groups
• Apply the five-step process to improve communication
• Identify when PLAY can be most useful
• Supplement your creative program with the Power of Play
• Avoid conversational roundabouts
• Use flow theory and underlying neuroscientific principles that make this so powerful and memorable
• Facilitate and explore ideas on a deeper level using a play chest of new tools

Let’s get ready to PLAY!

This week of programming explores the shared foundation of Creative Problem Solving (CPS), coaching skills, and affective skills: each shaping how people think, connect, and create change. You’ll begin the week with A Creative Coach’s Toolbox, building practical coaching tools that bring the CPS process to life in real conversations. The second half of the week focuses on The Head and Heart of Innovation: Affective Skills of CPS, where you'll deepen your awareness of the emotional and mental conditions that influence every stage of thinking. Together, these elements reveal a powerful truth: effective creativity and innovation isn’t just about process, but about how we show up within it. By the end of the week, you’ll be equipped to guide both the path of ideas and the human experience that fuels them.

Part 1 (Monday - Tuesday): 
A Creative Coach’s Toolbox - Kathy Goller
A coaching conversation – whether done in a business setting or a classroom, as part of therapy, or as a professional coach – is really just the creative problem solving process in action!  Managers, educators, counselors, coaches and all those who want to help others maximize their potential will benefit from learning some CPS tools and exploring how they can be used in coaching conversations.
Participants will:

1. Understand the similarities between the CPS process and the flow of a coaching conversation
2. Build their competency with CPS tools
3. Learn ways to apply those tools in coaching conversations

 

This immersive week explores the dynamic power of polarities as a catalyst for creativity, collaboration, and innovation. We begin with Genius Teams: Polarities in Practice, a deep dive into polarities in practice, building a shared foundation and observing live facilitation to see how teams navigate real-time tensions and unlock high performance. As the week unfolds, participants will sharpen their ability to recognize and work with these dynamics in their own contexts. We close with Assumption: Friend AND Foe, using playful, perspective-shifting approaches to challenge thinking and expand what’s possible, using polarity thinking and humor for insight and exploration.

Part 1 (Monday - Wednesday):  Genius Teams - Lindsay Burr
It’s one thing to understand a model. It’s another thing to watch it used in real time. This session offers both. Grounded in polarity thinking, participants will learn the Genius Team Model (9 stages of team development with a key polarity or “tension” in each stage) for navigating the ongoing tensions that create a high-performing team. This session bridges the gap between understanding a model and watching it unfold live. Designed for facilitators with some familiarity with polarities.

Through Orientation (Day 1), Live Practice (Day 2), and Debrief/Translation (Day 3), participants will:

• Understand the Genius Team Model
• Recognize real-time signals of poorly leveraged stages
• Apply practical strategies drawn from live facilitation

DAY 2: provides a rare opportunity to observe a full facilitation in a fishbowl format. Participants will see how a facilitator makes real-time decisions: what they listen for, where they intervene, and how they work with competing dynamics as they unfold. Watch a live engagement with the clients and then a group debrief of the experience and observations. A structured debrief makes the invisible visible, translating observation into concrete facilitation practice.

In this immersion, you’ll apply the CPS process to the art of facilitation design to create experiences that truly deliver. We’ll begin by unpacking the factors that influence great design, including timing, flow, and session dynamics, so you can design with clarity and intention. You’ll also rethink how to select tools and activities.
The Lab comes to life as we move beyond choosing from existing tools to confidently creating what’s needed in the moment. Through rapid prototyping, you’ll co-create new activities and build a repeatable method for inventing, adapting, and refining tools on the fly.
Ideal for facilitators and trainers, this is a hands-on, design-intensive experience with meaningful, ready-to-use outcomes.