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Trust “Balance Sheet”
Trust in a team or organization is critical for taking risks and leveraging intelligent failure for innovative results. Download a PDF file of our free Trust Balance Sheet – and start a conversation in your team or workgroup about your trust ‘assets’ and ‘liabilities’. Use the Trust Balance Sheet to strengthen a foundation of trust that supports creative action.

Beyond New Ideas
This informative article explores the challenges associated with effective interventions to boost innovation capability, and makes key recommendations for evaluating the depth and breadth of proposals by external consultants.

Creative License™ Creativity Quiz
This resource provides a “quick quiz” with some reflection questions that can be used to start a conversation to clarify what people believe about creativity. Keep in mind that the value of this tool lies in the quality of the dialogue that is generated – not from the tool itself. Therefore it is important to set a context for its use, and then work to draw out important issues that emerge.

Your Story of Opportunity
Over the course of our lives, through our experiences, we make decisions about what it means to be creative, how we measure up, and about the consequences of creative action. These decisions crystallize over time, and impact both when and how we choose to express creativity.

This resource is designed to help you reflect on your story of opportunity—and draw out the strengths as well as the challenges in your past experiences… so that you can make new and different choices about how you want to engage with your creative potential and how you can create more effectively with others.

• The Reflection Guide is meant to be used individually, to help you explore how your opportunities and experiences have influenced the ways you express your creative potential today.
• The Interview Guide is designed to guide you and a trusted partner/colleague as you coach each other and explore ways to shift into a new story of what creativity is and who you are as creators.

Download both resources together today!

Activate Your Entrepreneurial Spirit
Your context can make a big difference in how entrepreneurism shows up. You might be working inside an organization, pulling ideas through complex organizational structures and processes, and likely navigating “organizational sludge.” You might be out on your own—leading a start-up with a lean leadership team and just enough resources to get to your next milestone. Maybe you’re seeking your next round of capital or submitting grant applications to fund your not-for profit venture.

The Power of Creativity in Execution
Creativity is not the enemy of execution. The Great Place to Work Institute, renowned for their evaluation of the best companies to work for, helps shed light on the impact of what they call an “Innovation By All” company culture. “Companies that build an ‘Innovation By All’ culture generate more high-quality ideas, realize greater speed in implementation, and achieve greater agility—resulting in 5.5 times the revenue growth of peers with a less inclusive approach to innovation.”

CREATIVITY is the Work: Invention is Just One Outcome
The notion that creativity only happens in invention and discovery is limiting. This article busts this commonly held myth, and shows how it obscures the potential for creativity to show up in any given moment from the birth of new ideas through their implementation, upkeep, and the ongoing evolution of legacy systems.

Three Big Things Leaders Get Wrong About Innovation
What gets in your way when you work to inspire innovative results from your team and organization? There are several big roadblocks—primarily in our mindset— that get in the way. This article explores these, along with three key practices that will help leaders and their teams shift behavior to drive the generation of new value.

Co-creating Across Boundaries
Are people in your organization leaving value on the table by thinking narrowly—only focusing on simplifying, improving, and optimizing for your specific function? This article explores four best practices for co-creating more effectively across boundaries—especially when there are critical handoffs and a shared stake in business outcomes.

Stop Overwhelming Your Leaders
We’re all under pressure to deliver results, adapt to changing conditions, incorporate new technologies, and tighten our belts. But too often, we overwhelm our leaders, managers—and the entire organization in many cases—with disconnected and uncoordinated change mandates. This article explores three best practices for simplifying and aligning your requests for leaders in support of change initiatives.

Download all Press Articles at Once
You can download all of Steven’s Press Articles at once. The downloadable ZIP file will contain all of the above press articles in an easy-to-read PDF file format.