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-HernandezEvery 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.