I had some fun again today helping with the UCT Graduate School of Business' Think Indaba. It was a day within their 10 day Executive Leadership Programme to give the delegates some creative stimulus to engage their worlds differently.

Thanks to Shaun Bond (Vida e Caffe), Stefan Rabe (Axiz), Tanner Methvin (Spier) and Adrian Ristow (Coca Cola SABCO) for sharing with us their stories on customer experience, employee ownership, green business, and operating in multiple contexts. These created a great foundation to for the delegates to see their organisations in new ways.

What was really fantastic was the process of drawing up rich pictures of what we could expect in the next 5 years - 2012 SA turns 18 ie. "comes of age".

Essentially this was a process of getting the delegate goups to articulate visually what they think are the key factors facing organisations operating in Africa.

Luckily for them we got four artists/illustrators from Vega to act as graphic recorders, and collectively we got some awesome rich pictures. The sense of optimism that pervaded everyone about Africa was very inspiring - remember that the delegates at the indaba were from quite a few countries in the region, not just purely SA.

To the Vega guys - Jade, Philip, Katleho and Dennis, and to my co-facilitators (Elspeth Donavan, Christophe Gillet, James Gardner & Robert Poynton) thanks for sharing your deep experience and talents with me.

As promised, here are my creative thinking tools/rich picture slides of the event [800kb pdf].

Some references of the stuff I covered:

Allan D., Kingdon M., Murrin K., Rudkin D., How to Start a Creative Revolution at Work, Capstone, London, 2000
Kelly T., & Littman J., The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, HarperCollins Business, London, 2001
Sutton R.I., Weird Ideas that Work, Penguin, London, 2002

PS Christophe & Robert: This was the cellphone remote control I was using (Windows version).