Strategic and Creative Thinking Skills

Create innovative business ideas and develop long-term strategic advantage

The purpose of this course

To enable you to generate highly creative and pragmatic propositions; to elevate your commercial and operational awareness and to improve your ability to develop excellent long-term marketing strategies. In addition to receiving creative thinking tools you will also acquire a variety of highly effective executive level thinking tools so that you are better equipped to get your ideas heard and implemented.

Who this course is for

This masterclass is for marketers who feel that their practice and strategic thinking ability would be improved by developing their original thinking skills and their strategic level decision making abilities. It is best suited to those ready to be developed and further stretched. It will be particularly useful for any manager making a transition from a tactical to a strategic role. Prior strategic planning experience is not required.

Benefits for your organisation

This masterclass is very much hands-on and designed to help transfer high value executive level original thinking and decision making skills. Our aim is to help you and your organisation thrive under increasingly demanding conditions. You will be able to take back to your organisation the ability to develop a wider range of actionable options to make things happen.

Benefits for you as an individual

You will be better able to create original solutions to business problems and produce increasingly robust strategies. We will enhance your executive level decision making skills and improve your strategic awareness. You will expand your executive level decision-making ability. Learn how to deliver higher quality results for yourself and your organisation in an increasingly complex and pressured world.

You will learn how to

• Develop pragmatic creative ideas and strategic choices on demand
• Confidently generate a wide variety of options
• Tap into the power of concepts
• Understand strategic contexts and limitations of certainty
• Understand how levels of certainty can motivate or hinder decisions
• Appreciate the proper place for error
• What aids and what hinders innovation
• Turn your ideas into reality in the workplace
• Demonstrate your strategic awareness and your ideas longer term viability
• Deal with implementation issues
• Employ alternative thinking tools when faced with complex issues
• Understand alternative perceptions and how people think
• Gain insights into how understanding others can help you get things done
• Understand how to influence people and get your ideas adopted

Course content

• About perception and beliefs
• Developing creative options exercise
• Converting ideas into workable strategies
• How to strengthen a new idea
• Limits of logic
• Assumptions creative development exercise
• Certainty, uncertainty and timely decision making
• Ideas concerning innovation
• Tapping into the power of concepts
• About complex problems, an ambiguity exercise
• Context tools and strategic planning
• Exploiting our intuition exercise
• Power and influence
• Personal and organisational strategy
• How do you get to be successful and get things done?
• Peer group clinic

To take away from the course

• Creative thinking tools
• Multiple mental models that will aid decision making and problem solving
• A heightened sense of self awareness
• Templates for developing personal and business strategies
• A detailed recommended reading list

Professional Standards

CIM’s Professional Marketing Standards have been developed through extensive research with employers and leading academics. All of our marketing qualifications and training courses are based on this framework ensuring that marketers at all levels of seniority gain the practical skills that employers require to improve business performance.