Interview with Ingrid Rip, Certified trainer and owner of RRE
Q: How do you boost the levels of creativity at events?
Creativity is a powerful phenomenon that I like to use as a tool to reach goals for training sessions, events and conferences. I organise and boost creativity primarily by the way sessions are designed. What does the initiator want to achieve and what type of session fits best?
Creativity is interesting for a whole lot of reasons. Creativity makes people curious, which intensifies the experience and thus strengthens the memory. But also, when you have people physically move it activates the brain in a different manner than just sitting and listening (i.e. delegates that move from flip-over to flip-over) and provides valuable input to themes or challenges posed. It makes them actively discuss, write and draw their theories and solutions. Our brain’s associative power will help inspiration to flow and create new ideas that can be presented afterwards in a plenary.
Q: How do you sell creativity at events?
I don’t sell creativity at events; as said, I use it as a tool, so depending on the event I use creative decoration, use various setups, have delegates create something together or suggest to start with a short creative workshop, which I did with “mind mapping”. It provided a practical tool to summarise what delegates hear/learn at the event and they can immediately put it to use. Or you can have a professional to provide a creative summary of the conference. You can use the result as content in your follow up: a picture says more than a thousand words.
Success starts with setting goals at the start and finding the right (creative) designs to meet them!
Q: How do you measure creativity at events?
Measuring creativity? I evaluate sessions. If sessions are evaluated as good to great then you have a positive first feedback. At a later stage you do research to find out more detailed information, such as how often people actually used the information shared or the tool taught, what they liked or disliked about the presenter, whether the set up used enhanced the learning etc. Then you know for a fact if the chosen methods worked.
