More and more, the word from above – from government, from corporate and university management – is that we have to do more with less. This is symptomatic of the current climate of austerity, particularly when it comes to the use of public funds. Enduring a recession means managing the pressure of cost-saving cut-backs without letting go of important goals and objectives that will allow for growth.

This kind of challenge, in the short term, can actually improve our productivity as it forces us to test our own assumptions about how long things take, how many people are required, or how much it costs to do what we’ve set out to do. Tremendous creativity can result from rethinking what you do to survive an austerity budget.

Knowinnovation realizes that there is a lot of pressure on universities in the UK to have more impact despite the limits on resources. We’ve taken this into consideration, fine-tuning our Catalyst facilitation development workshops to help people pick up tools that will help them get the more creativity from of their colleagues in the shortest amount of time.

How do you ensure creative outcomes from every meeting that you lead or facilitate? It’s all about making sure that you are clear about what you need to achieve in that short one or two-hour meeting. Its about getting the right people round the table and it’s about pre-meeting preparation and using tools and techniques that enable you to use the time effectively to get to creative outcomes.

Time can be the greatest limitation, so it’s also about understanding what you can realistically achieve in the time allocated and deliberately managing expectations of everyone involved.

Knowinnovation has developed a workshop for the upcoming Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA) conference in June, titled “How to create a great meeting from nothing?” The workshop offers tools to help you make the most out of those short meetings that have tall objectives, where you need results in limited time or you need to create more value with fewer resources.

If you’re interested in attending, click here to get more information about the ARMA conference being held at the East Midlands Conference center at the University of Nottingham’s University Park campus on June 11th and 12th, and be sure to sign up for our program, which will be held in the afternoon on Wednesday, June 12th.

It seems like the culture of “more with less” is here to stay, at least for a while. We hope this workshop will help participants face this challenge with enthusiasm and energy, and see it as an opportunity rather than a problem.

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Know Further:

Buckminster Fuller coined the term ephemeralization to characterize the way technology has driven doing more with less. The myths and reality of more with less. And how doing more with less, over a long period of time, can be depleting and lead to, well, less.

Some people think that creativity is a bit of magic or genius – it can be – but we’d argue that it’s possible to be very deliberately creative by using a process. KI’s methodology is based on the Creative Problem Solving Process (CPS), a multi-step model developed by a businessman and an academic, in the 1950s. The premise is that creativity is not uniquely a Eureka experience, but that we can apply a deliberate method to produce new ideas and novel results. Creativity doesn’t have to be an accident or a bit of luck; you can do it on purpose. Keep reading »

During the creative problem solving process, there’s a stage when we encourage people to capture all the information about the problem we’re trying to solve. There are lots of ways to do this, but often we’ll collect people at a table with the goal of gathering data and we’ll ask them to write down all the information about the challenge that might be pertinent. At this point, the client – or stakeholder, or problem owner – will describe their situation. The explanation usually begins with a preamble.

“Well, we tried to propose this research a couple of times before, and I’ve lost some energy because my department head is not supporting me, but here’s what I think we could…”

Then they go on to describe the situation, which is when people start taking notes. Rarely does anyone write down the throwaway data: Keep reading »

Hacker is a word that gets hijacked too often, casually tossed out as an adjective – not always but usually pejorative – to describe someone capable of cracking the code of a computer system and having their way with it. Editor of the Jargon File, Eric Steve Raymond, would substitute the label “cracker” for that subset of the code-literate community. “Hackers build things,” he says, “crackers break them.” Keep reading »