Creative Problem Solving Institute 2026

How can we turn fear of disaster into fuel for community resilience? Join this high-energy "Design Studio" to use Creative Problem Solving (CPS) to catalyze social impact. In this hands-on session, you will work in a small team to ideate and develop a "Quick Quest" — a 5-10 minute game-based activity — to help individuals and communities prepare to face a wildfire, flood, or other disaster. You’ll leave with a tangible game concept, a behind-the-scenes look at designing for social impact, and a playful yet powerful tool for rapid collaborative problem-solving.    

Takeaways

• Rapid CPS Iteration: Experience a ""lightning-fast"" application of the CPS stages to move from problem description to playable prototype in under 90 minutes.
• Game Design for Impact: Embrace the concept of ""Serious Games"" and see how play can create a safe space for addressing sensitive and high-stakes issues.
• The ""Serious Creativity"" Mindset: Discover how to maintain a bias toward results while balancing divergent exploration with convergent decision-making.

Kaleidoscope of YOU offers an intimate yet expansive invitation to pause, play, and reawaken child-like curiosity. You will engage in guided daydreaming, visible thinking, writing, and creative mark-making to explore your past, present, and future creative selves. The journey continues in a “Living Gallery Walk.” This innovative workshop also invites others in the CPSI community to contribute to the collective creativity of the Kaleidoscope of YOU.

Takeaways:

• Reframe your creative identity through reflection and playful exploration.
• Reconnect with early experiences of creativity, joy, and imagination.
• Integrate past, present, and future creative selves into your practice.

Narrative is one of the most under-used tools in applied creativity. This workshop introduces Language of Renewal™, a framework that helps participants reframe complexity and ambiguity through metaphor, story structure, and reflective creativity practices. Through hands-on exercises, participants learn how narration can discover insight, reduce cognitive rigidity, and strengthen creative problem-solving. The session blends research and experiential learning to help educators, leaders, and practitioners integrate narrative-based creativity into their work.    

Takeaways

• How to use metaphor, reframing, and story-mapping to enhance creative problem-solving.
• Practical methods for helping students, teams, or clients navigate ambiguity by reshaping the “story” of a challenge.
• A replicable framework (Language of Renewal™) for integrating narrative intelligence into teaching, leadership, and innovation.

Before we analyze, we sense.  Before we articulate, we feel.  Before we problem-solve with logic, we can access embodied wisdom. Come experience Possibility Books, a creative practice that activates and helps us access the inner wisdom living within each of us.  We’ll play with mark-making coupled with dialogue to transform these insights into actionable intuition that can be used for more logical creative problem-solving processes, which you can take with you to your own professional and personal lives.    

Takeaways

• An elevated understanding of how embodied wisdom generates insight
• The transformation of insight to actionable creative ideas 
• A method for redesigning how you begin the creative process    

Creative Problem Solving (CPS) is a process with many hidden gifts and coping mechanisms to fact today's challenges. This experiential and interactive session will explore the evolution, revolution and application of Divergence and Convergence in CPS in every aspect of our daily lives, if we are willing to take the plunge. We will take a deep dive in the intricacies of divergence and convergence and leave with a self-constructed personal plan for implementation. Come open --minded, open-hearted and thirsty for the outcomes.     

Takeaways

• Taking this deep dive into the history of divergence and convergence helps us understand its potential and power in all aspects of our lives.
• Exploring brain theory and emotional intelligence, as they relate to divergence and convergence, facilitates one's pathway to walking into ourselves with tools and skill sets to manage ever-increasing challenges today. 
• Understanding the importance of self-exploration with this dynamic thinking duo promotes investment, practice, and commitment for success.     

Illuminators shine a light on others. They make people and their ideas come alive. 
With their distinct blend of skills, they excel as facilitators and relationship builders.

Illuminators make others feel seen, heard, and appreciated. Their curiosity invites richer stories and deeper insights. They see and celebrate others’ strengths.

Takeaways:
In this session, you’ll work with a partner to cultivate illuminator skills and instincts.
You’ll see what distinguishes an illuminator from a diminisher and learn a variety of illuminator “moves”:

• Genuine Curiosity: Asking surprisingly simple questions that reveal richer stories
• Active Listening: Using your eyes and body (and silence) to make others feel heard
• Celebration of Strengths: Expressing your partner’s unique qualities to create a deeper connection

This 90‑minute, highly interactive workshop invites CPSI participants to “elevate” their practice by shifting from mastery-as-endpoint to curiosity-as-engine, using improv, design thinking, and AI as complementary tools. Drawing on research with 94 community college students, Betsy Tuma will show how short, guided improv activities significantly elevated participants’ creative self-concept and individual idea generation, then connect those findings to her “Curiosity Over Mastery” framework for creative and critical thinking in the age of AI. AI will be treated not as an answer machine but as a live curiosity partner—something to interrogate, remix, and “yes–and” in service of more original, learner‑driven ideas.    

Takeaways

• Curiosity, not correctness, is the real engine of elevated creative problem solving in an AI‑saturated world.
• Short, structured improv activities measurably boost creative confidence and idea fluency, making groups braver and more generative.
• AI can be designed into sessions as a curiosity partner—something to interrogate, remix, and “yes–and”—rather than a shortcut to the next right answer.    

In this session, participants will learn to create their own personal AI assistant by exploring and applying easy-to-use AI tools in ChatGPT. Attendees will learn to enhance their skills in creative problem solving, productivity, and innovation with the help of their personalized AI assistant. We’ll cover the fundamentals of prompt design for creating customized projects for real-world applications. Attendees will walk away with practical strategies to build AI tools that support their unique role in the workplace. They will use their AI assistant to apply the FourSight™ Collaboration model and CPS to amplify their creative thinking and collaboration skills.     

Takeaways

• Learn how to use ChatGPT to build a personalized AI assistant that supports your unique role, workflow, and creative challenges. 
• Gain practical strategies to leverage AI as a thought partner—enhancing your creative problem-solving, decision-making, and overall productivity.
• Use their new AI assistant to apply the FourSight™ Creative Mind Set Collaboration model and CPS to amplify their creative thinking and collaboration skills.