Innovation for the Public Sector Employee

Course Number: 136-CW
Recommended Duration: 1 Day

Intended Audience: Any level public sector employee, local or national

Course Overview
What opportunities for change exist in a culture of bureaucracy? How can employees be creative and innovate and still align with program or agency policies? Creativity can seem like magic – and it is – but it can also be demystified by understanding its intrinsic phases and underlying principles. There are simple but powerful tools that can help people generate more and better ideas. Policy makers rarely want to know next year’s cost of doing the same old thing. They want to make changes. What kind of changes can people create? How will they estimate the cost of the change and be realistic about the time it will take to implement it? This course explores creative thinking skills, the group creative process, the power of a great question, the use of a springboard story to sell an idea, the introduction of the “breakthrough generator matrix”, the concept of “brainwriting”, and a structured method for looking at the entire system, including costs. Great ideas can die in the weeds and get buried in the bureaucracy if an employee can’t look at feasibility and payoff and sort through the chaos to evaluate the ideas. This class offers tools to make innovation a part of doing business, with special attention to the public sector employee.

Objectives/Topics
As a result of taking this course, you will:

Take a mini-audit to know where to start to increase innovation in your program or agency
Discover your thinking style and how that impacts your innovations
Learn the guidelines for true brainstorming to spark the group creative process
Learn the four purposes for “cracking questions” and practice creating and answering them
Create your own “breakthrough generator matrix” to think about your service differently
Find out how to generate ideas collectively through “brainwriting”
Practice a structured method for looking at the entire system surrounding a decision
Consider feasibility and payoff for ideas to determine which ones to do, in what order
Get ideas to jumpstart the innovations you already have thought of
Learn how to evaluate your ideas and those of your team under the lens of your program or agency guidelines

Prerequisites: None

Innovation for the Public Sector Employee

Take a mini-audit to know where to start to increase innovation in your program or agency

Discover your thinking style and how that impacts your innovations

Learn the guidelines for true brainstorming to spark the group creative process

Learn the four purposes for “cracking questions” and practice creating and answering them

Create your own “breakthrough generator matrix” to think about your service differently

Find out how to generate ideas collectively through “brainwriting”

Practice a structured method for looking at the entire system surrounding a decision

Consider feasibility and payoff for ideas to determine which ones to do, in what order

Get ideas to jumpstart the innovations you already have thought of

Learn how to evaluate your ideas and those of your team under the lens of your program or agency guidelines