Creative – Page 20 – The Consulting Artist

Art for Work’s Sake – Manchester Summer School

Art for Work’s Sake Summer School is coming to Manchester – July 24th 2014

Would you like to explore some creative ways to make your work more enjoyable and productive? Are you based in or near Manchester? Are you free on the afternoon of July 24th 2014? If you answered yes to all three of those questions – please read on.

Before I take Art for Work’s Sake off to the USA in August and September, I thought it would be fun to branch out a little closer to home, so I’m running a specially priced, Art for Work’s Sake Summer School in Manchester. The workshop will run from 1.30pm to around 5pm, and the ticket price is just £90 inclusive of VAT, Eventbrite fees and all materials. There is also a ConnectingHR Manchester tweetup that evening so if you fancy exercising your creative muscles before a great social event, it would be lovely to see you.

These slides from a recent talk and workshop will give you a feel for some of the techniques and ideas we will experiment with on the day.

Full details including how to book your workshop ticket are on our Eventbrite page. For those who are also interested in the TweetUp – here’s the link for that too. I hope to see a few of you in Manchester – and if you could help by sharing this blog post that would be great! Thanks.

The Art of Leadership

Slides and notes from my talk and workshop at Learning Skills Group 2014. This deck includes links to research on why we find creativity hard, how to work through that difficulty, and some practical applications for creativity at work.

Here are the annotated slides from my talk and workshop at Learning Skills Group 2014. This deck includes links to research on why we find creativity hard, how to work through that difficulty, and some practical applications for creativity at work. There were about 100 of us in the room and I was impressed by how keenly people took part and got stuck into the visual challenges we cocreated. The feedback I received after the event was lovely too – thanks. Even though I’ve been playing with Art meets Work ideas for some time now, it’s always a pleasure to know that this often slightly risky work is landing usefully and enjoyably for people.

In addition to these slides, here is the link to the Visualising Your Work gallery from the same session that I put up earlier in the week. I hope you find something useful in here that you can apply to your own work. If you have any questions about the material – please drop me a line in the comments and I’ll help as best I can. The deck is on Slideshare for you to download and use, and like all my Slideshare stuff – it’s available under a Creative Commons attribution licence.

Work – of a Different Kind

Today I’m heading to Shoreditch to take part in Recfest. Before we get stuck into a day of talking how to make recruitment better, I’ll be playing and singing a few songs for whoever else is crazy enough to turn up at 08.45.

I’m on the train. What’s buzzing round my head right now?

The guitar I’m using today isn’t mine. I’ve not seen or played it before, so I’ll get there early enough to have a quick practice.

I have a bunch of tunes to choose from, more than enough for the time I’ll be playing. I know which one I’m starting with and beyond that, we’ll see. I want the flexibility to develop the set as I go.

I enjoy encouraging people to try out different ways to work, and for me, today is one of those days where I step into a different, uncertain space. I need to feel that uncertainty personally, direct contact with it matters to me.

There will be bum notes. There always are.

I am nervous, and excited too. Tuning the dial between nerves and excitement is a tension I enjoy, most of the time!

I hope your day holds something a little different for you too, enjoy tuning your dial to suit the mood.

Update

It’s approaching 1 o’clock in the afternoon, and Recfest continues at a pace. I’ve done my bit and left everyone to it, thanks for having me folks. I woke up very early today, around 4.30am, probably due to early onset of adrenalin. I feel very tired right now, and I thought I should update the post to reflect that. Doing stuff that we are not used to can be tiring – so whether you are encouraging folk to work differently, or challenging them to, I think it’s worth being mindful that these new and less usual things take a lot of energy.