ATTENTION: This session requires advance signup to attend. For Online Schedule: Please utilize the RSVP link below the description to reserve your seat. For SXSW GO App: Use the RSVP 'Find a Timeslot' link. You must have a SXSW Interactive, Gold, or Platinum badge to attend, and, you must have an activated SXsocial account (social.sxsw.com) to reserve a seat. If you have any issues with signing up, please email support@sxsw.com. VERY IMPORTANT: Because of the limited space, we recommend you arrive at least 15 minutes prior to the published start time of this session. If you have not checked in at the room you RSVPed for at least five minutes prior to the session start time, you may lose your seat to an attendee in the waiting list line.

Prerequisites:
A goal, wish or challenge (personal or professional) that you think requires creative thinking and that inspired you to come to this event.

What to Bring:
Bring your goal or wish or challenge, good humor, and a way to take notes.

Admit it. You just came out of a meeting where you needed a creative solution and you’re not confident you got one. Believe it or not, the toughest challenges often require you to be disciplined AND creative at the same time. But who can really do that? Furthermore, who has time to follow creative thinking protocols? When you read about them, they all seem designed for people who have months to find answers. Most of us are lucky if we have minutes.

In this participatory workshop, you’ll learn the fundamentals of creative thinking and walk away with 3 simple, practical tools – called ""Yes and"", ""GPS"" and ""The Bad Boys"" – which you can use immediately to help you solve the challenges that are thrown at you daily. You’ll also get tips for how to be a better facilitator of thinking sessions, and how to help others be better creative thinkers as well.

Our workshop starts with a discussion of the types of challenges you face that require creative solutions and the experiences you’ve had trying to find that creative solution. In the first 45 minutes you will:
• Participate in a brief exercise that demonstrates your own inherent creative thinking capabilities
• Extrapolate from the exercise the fundamentals of creative thinking, particularly divergent and convergent thinking.

For the next 75 minutes you will learn and practice 3 deceptively simple yet highly practical tools that you can use anytime you need to come up with creative solutions. You’ll learn:
• How to encourage ideas through a basic divergent thinking tool called “Yes/And…”
• How to get to “outside-the-box” ideas using a tool called “Bad Boys and Girls”
• How to take a crazy idea and turn it into a great and usable idea by using “GPS”.

We will wrap our session by giving participants a chance to apply the tools to their own goal or wish or challenge they have brought with them.