DAY TWO

We’ve all witnessed great, inspiring presentations and speeches. There are a few lucky people who are able to speak off the cuff easily, but most of us need to practice.

Tomorrow your team will wow us with a great opening that expresses the vision and outcome of your project. Then you’ll build out the plot with the details of how it all happens. And then you wrap it all up with an inspiring finish that makes us believe that your idea is really going to happen.

As a team, paint a picture that we can truly see in our mind, engage our senses, make us feel your project. And do end with a call to action. Ask us to join you, fund you, or play with you. Whatever makes sense for your project.

You may speak, sing, act, or run the PowerPoint slides. Whatever your participation, try to stretch a little. If you are always a presenter, try helping with the materials and coach others to speak.

Key Competencies

• Communication
• Marketing
• Access Between Community & Creatives
• Interactive Arts Experiences
• Creative Thinking
• Using Technology
• Mentoring

Help is on the way! Now that you have your whole project mapped out, you’re going to share with another team. This isn’t exactly a prototyping exercise, but it is direct feedback and time for reflection and refinement.

Use your Canvas to share your project and the details. You will not be judged for your presentation skills—that’s for tomorrow. What you really want is feedback so that you can refine your project and be ready to dig into your presentation preparation. So share things that you’re struggling with so that you can get advice or new ideas.

Remember the spirit of the “Yes, and” exercise? Now is the time to use it again—with constructive feedback. Sharing criticism isn’t helpful if you aren’t heard.

Key Competencies

• Design Thinking, Planning & Management
• Business Planning
• Access Between Community & Creatives
• Communication
• Collaboration
• Emotional Intelligence
• Creative Thinking
• Paradigm Shift

Now it’s time to put it all together—dig into the logistics of how your project will actually happen. What will it cost? What can you fundraise or earn for revenues? How will you staff it— consultants, paid staff, or volunteers? This work will likely significantly Shift your project. You will discover that your project is too big for your $10,000 budget — even with low-cost marketing.

When you start planning back from your event date or project milestones, you discover that you don’t have enough time to get everything done to meet your goals.

This isn’t the time to give up. It’s time to Shift your project and make it realistic so that it really can be implemented. You don’t want your project to sit on a shelf as a dusty idea.

Key Competencies

• Business Planning
• Design Thinking, Planning & Management
• Collaboration
• Revenue & Fund Development
• Finance & Bookkeeping
• Human Resources
• Creative Thinking

Marketing is the conversation you have with your audience or customer. But it’s very difficult to talk with everyone. It’s much easier to talk with smaller groups who have something in common. You can be more directed in your conversation. Target markets are just subgroups of your large, potential audience that you decide are most likely to appreciate your conversation and project.

Thanks to the Internet, we have access to new conversation tools like social media. And we can identify our target market a lot faster because we can search for our audience across the entire world.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t have to work—cutting through the white noise of the Internet isn’t easy. But you don’t have to spend money on print advertising, billboards, tv ads, or phone calls anymore. You just have to invest in a good conversation.

Key Competencies

• Marketing
• Social Media
• Using Technology
• Paradigm Shift
• Business Planning
• Project Design, Planning & Management
• Collaboration
• Creative Thinking
• Interactive Arts Experiences

Now that you have the basics of your Community Collaboration project, it’s time to learn more about what it can become. This is the Ideation stage of the Design Thinking process. The goal is to learn more about the people you’re hoping to serve or impact. Determine if there are others doing a similar project that you can learn from or collaborate with. What kinds of revenues might be possible? Are there funders interested in the topic area or activity you’re planning?

The good news is that finding this kind of information is really easy, thanks to the Internet. We have access to loads of data that can help us quickly figure out that we need to tweak our project because someone else is doing exactly the same thing or because our audience is too big.

Key Competencies

• Using Technology
• Collaboration
• Business Planning
• Project Design, Planning & Management
• Revenue & Fund Development
• Marketing
• Communication
• Mentoring
• Board & Advisory Development
• Emotional Intelligence

This is the most challenging exercise of the workshop. Your team will achieve consensus — you will brainstorm and then refine your ideas into an actual Community Collaboration Project that you all agree to work on together.

This is not easy work. And the design process is not easy. The design process allows us to be open to ideas for a longer period of time, but it also forces us to be constrained. We have deadlines to meet, budgets that can’t be changed, and specific success metrics and indicators that we want to achieve.

Design Thinking is an interactive process that is human centered. Always think about the people you are serving, helping, or trying to change.

Key Competencies

• Project Design, Planning & Management
• Creative Thinking
• Collaboration
• Communication
• Emotional Intelligence
• Access Between Community & Creatives
• Paradigm Shift
• Business Planning
• Marketing
• Revenue & Fund Development
• Interactive Arts Experiences

All of us want be more creative—on command. Sometimes we forget that creativity comes in many forms and disguises. The inspirational burst is very different from the iterative refinement process. Scientists and researchers are learning that being creative is not relegated to one side of our brain—right-brained versus left-brained is no longer a safe way to describe creativity.

Some of us certainly spend more time dreaming, scheming, and imagining. And others find that they can help someone else express an idea through structured refinements. The key is to give ourselves the freedom to turn off our inner critic and share crazy ideas that may lead to a brilliant innovation. And then to turn our inner critic back on and turn that crazy idea into real action.

We think that having creativity at the table, no matter the situation, can help provide an additional dimension that adds value.

Key Competencies

• Creative Thinking
• Access Between Community & Creatives
• Design Thinking
• Interactive Arts Experiences & Exposure
• Emotional Intelligence
• Paradigm Shift
• Project Design, Planning & Management

The heart of the Shift Workshop is learning how to work well with a team that includes people who have different personalities, skills, motivations, and mental models. The goal is to find some common ground—wanting a deep connection between art, business, and community— that allows the group to use everyone’s different skills to make something awesome together.

We know that successful collaborations need to include people with different points of view and different skill sets. The trick is to find ways to communicate that bring out the best in everyone. Folks who like to talk a lot need to remember to listen. And people who are quieter, need to be encouraged to share. Most importantly, we all need to be respectful, remember the ground rules, and check our egos so that the team can form quickly.

Key Competencies

• Collaboration
• Human Resources
• Emotional Intelligence
• Paradigm Shift
• Access Between Community & Creatives
• Communication