I chose THNK’s program because they seemed to be doing what I wanted to do, albeit for a very different target audience. But in re-imagining what the education of change makers could be, or rather, what it needs to become, we are walking very similar paths and I wanted to experience THNK’s approach firsthand.

Responding to the widely-perceived gap between university education and the marketplace for jobs, the Amani Institute’s mission is to develop next-generation talent for solving social problems. We do this by pioneering a new model for higher education that offers participants opportunities to get an intensive experience of cross-boundary work, develop practical skills to build their professional toolkit, and understand the personal journey this work requires in order to be effective and sustainable as an individual over time – all things that employers desire and that are critical for long term career success. This methodology comes to life in our Certificate in Social Innovation Management held in Nairobi but open to anyone in the world. Please apply NOW on the website or pass this message on to friends and networks that would be interested in learning about this opportunity.

In the process, we build much-needed capacity in civil society organizations, enabling more effective operations across the entire field. Finally, our end goal is less to create a large new training institution than to change the higher education system, and our students become pioneers in fostering that new way of thinking. We want to inspire universities to adopt the Amani Institute methodology to train the new professionals and leaders the world needs in the 21st century.

Personally speaking, I have always been passionate about people creating and living lives of purpose and meaning, and have always encouraged people to step out of the beaten path and follow their own unique calling. But despite having the best education in the world, I often felt unprepared for the type of work I wanted to do and usually learnt more on the job than in the classroom. Speaking at universities across North America, I found this to be true of most of the students I met. At the same time, I was working with some of the most accomplished social entrepreneurs in the world and they all complained that their biggest constraint was finding the right talent – this in a world of high unemployment. I felt that the problem lay in the education system and wanted to create a new education model to solve it.

THNK has been invaluable in ways both big and hard to articulate effectively (instilling a design sensibility; showing the importance of the small, unexpected treat for your customer when running a service; opening a window into the European way; showing how to build a tribe) and specific aspects such as its open-ness with all its intellectual property, bringing together a stunningly accomplished group of people from around the world, high quality programming that still retains an experimental flair…I could go on.

However, I would say that the single most valuable thing has been the addition to my life of an amazing network of people, many of whom have been incredibly generous with their time and resources, from the founders, faculty, and staff to my fellow participants. In a typical year, we are incredibly lucky if we make two or three new friends whom we feel we can rely upon – in my THNK year, I made roughly 40 new friends and it is hard to capture the gratitude I feel about that.

Thank you for this opportunity to share what we do. Please check out our call for applications for our Social Innovation Management program, and pass it on to anyone whom you think might be interested. And do follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

A lot has been written on THNK from my fellow THNK participants about the program and now as the fourth module is on my doorstep I´m thinking back how those intense 6 months (actually only 35 days if you would be continously at THNK) have changed me and where I still need change.

Its about those internal fights with your Ego, your inner sustainability and the ways how you should transform yourself to the new person you´re longing to become for a longer time.

THNK isnt for the faint of heart, its an very intense program where you will experience change on both professional and personal level, if you are willing to get changed beyond what you expected at the beginning of that journey. How far do you really go with those changes? What is your purpose for joining THNK? Very probably not only to take the next step on your professional career and also not alone for learning tools for creative leadership. I think we all joined also for that not that easy to reachable feeling to really change our own inner attitudes, seeing ourselves mirrored how we really see ourselves and what we could become if we would put those changes into action.

The greek described those special times with the word “Kairos” and with a special homour made a god out of that Kairos: One with a bold head and only a mop of hair at his forehead – to seize the chance. Today Kairos comes in different forms: Either as “the song that changed my life” or “Blink! The power of thinking without thinking”. Connecting thought is that we are longing for those special moments in life where you can grab those rare new opportunities with your open hands.

But lets be honest: How can we make our time at THNK to that special Kairos time that really moves to act and change our lives from the inside out?! And is it really true that there´s this one special Kairos in your life?! I doubt it and feel its more about continously training and preparing yourself to be ready when one moment comes, which isnt a moment at that time anymore, but true Life! And its those special times for learning the art of letting go.

The deepest and most challenging times at THNK were and are for me the talks with my leadership coach. At first I was hesitant opening up my life to her, as I thought this has no relevance to my learning points at THNK. I quickly learned that specially those personal points in my life are closely connected to the way how I want to accelerate forward with THNK and where I need to let go of hindering myself for achieving those goals. I experienced those hours were the most rewarding ones during the last six months and those where I learned the most about myself and preparing myself to truly become a creative leader.

If you are thinking about joining THNK at some point or are about to start next days with the 3rd class: I very much encourage you to look beyond the tools, strategies, challenges and forum talks you are going to work with and start digging deep into yourself. What are the points hindering yourself to become that new person, the one who is able to grasp the Kairos, getting deliberated in thoughts and actions, being inspired in new choices and going to take action by learning the art of letting go!

At THNK we believe in the power of sharing and educating through experience. This is why we will make more of our tools and methodology available to you over the next months. As a first step, we opened up the MIRROR and now we would like to share the ReFrame with you.

How do you go from looking at Mauritius as a small and insignificant island in the Indian Ocean to seeing Mauritius as the largest ocean state in the world? Reframing is an easy, four-step process to generate creative approaches for your own life and work. The technique of reframing is described in Reframing – the art of thinking differently [link to previous blog post] by THNK faculty Karim Benammar and is rooted in the theory of paradigms by Thomas Kuhn.

Reframing will take you out of your mental comfort zone, enabling you to discover new perspectives and creative solutions. It’s also a lot of fun – if you can make yourself chuckle during the process, you’re on the right path.

Try it right now at http://reframe.thnk.org/

As the fourth and final Challenge module approaches, I marvel at what we were able to accomplish even in just the first visit to THNK…in addition to how far we’ve come, how much we’ve grown, and how much fun is yet to be had with our Acceleration projects during the next year and beyond.

This video of my initial M2M Challenge team – Team F2K with Francisco and Felix – is a proud moment, made in literally 5 minutes at the end of Module 1 amid cleaning up the THNK home, wrapping up 10 days of mayhem, and dashing out to the canal boat “chariot” waiting to whisk us off to our closing night dinner.  And, while it felt a bit like a chapter summary at that time, I now see it as a prologue to the exploration around the subject matter, the alignment and realignment with team members, and quantum leaps in discovery and ideation that have followed.  The tool set which felt somewhat foreign is now familiar, adopted into everyday lexicon.  We have developed shorthand ways to shake our teammates our of ruts using applied improv techniques.  And we’ve significantly raised the bar on what impact and scale really mean.

In a couple of weeks, we will be presenting the outcome of the 6-month journey with our challenge topics – using M2M technologies to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and examining the future of education through master teachers.  Whatever happens, the blood, sweat, and tears shed on the Challenge have been an unforgettable part of my THNK experience.  And I can proudly look back at my Band of Bobs (that’s right!) with deep admiration and gratitude for pushing me when I needed it and supporting me when I took a risk.  We should all be so lucky to work in such teams!  Thanks, THNK!

I am a current participant in THNK’s Creative Leadership Program. And I find myself in an international environment where I am constantly offered elements that I didn’t know was looking for – talk about serendipity!

The methods of teaching here happen in a truly novel manner, which translates to an optimized learning experience for each participant. To me, THNK feels more and more like a home instead of a School and that makes it very special.

The thing that inspires me most is the thought that has gone into everything in the program and the extent to which our feedback is processed and translated to the program by the faculty.

Several things stand out and make my experience so special.

The people: I am among a very diverse group of impressive people from all over the world. And they all have strong passions for driving innovative change.

Quest: The individual Creative Leadership coaching part (called Quest) was new to me, and turned out to be exactly at the right time that I needed it.

Campus time: Our time on campus is very much a pressure-cooker experience, and this creates a unique chemistry between us as participants.

Forums: Forum sessions have a special structure that also inspires the speaker to open up and learn from us too,  I am referring to the inspiring exchange during the Forum session with Ben van Berkel.

I’ve loved so many elements of the program so far, like: storytelling that moves to act, thinking big on societal impact, and I literally get connected to the world every time I come here!

All in all it is like a true Swiss army knife for innovation at THNK.

One participant’s eyes went up and to the side as she visibly tried this out inside her mind. What if… You could almost see energy go up and down neural connections as a little cart on a rollercoaster: ‘what if the underpinnings of that statement I just made were not true….’ The little cart went down the huge pylons that support the rollercoaster: what if this is not solid but floating on air… what then… and then suddenly her whole face shone up, as if there was now a crack of light in the tunnel she had been trudging along in. It was internal light of course but it shone on her face as if the sun just burst through.

Seeing people gain huge insights is seeing people at their absolute best and most beautiful. It’s daunting and awe-inspiring.

It’s Aha and haha combined.

It makes you a believer again in human potential if you were ever lacking there.. Creating space for insights leads to deeply individual understandings. It’s not about turning people around. It’s about giving them space to seek out the new in their thinking and the clarity and freedom that can come with that. And the outcome is sheer magic!

Peer coaching is an element of the THNK creative leadership program. It involves helping a colleague or friend examine their thinking which can then lead to breakthroughs.  Since allowing the new in your thinking is quite difficult but so valuable, I am constantly on the search for further insights on how to enable this magical moment. Do you have any ideas or thoughts?

Robert Wolfe, coach at THNK

Our third module at at the THNK School for Creative Leadership was different, because it’s changing us all.

As our lives at home inevitably unfold, these shifts merge into our THNK experience and we learn how Creative Leadership is not just about innovation, but about becoming a self-aware, well rounded human being. Marriages, new jobs, babies, break-ups, illness, they are all present in our group and the daily emergence of a new experience from one of us, give each day together a different mood.

At THNK our Qigong inspired morning practice shows us through our own bodies how we are too passive or too aggressive in groups, show us who leads, but has no followers, who is focused on the future and who is stuck in the past. These are things we see in each other but probably never see in ourselves.

Working in new groups keeps us on our toes. Shows us our flaws; who doesn’t listen, who doesn’t speak, who gives up, who gets angry. How a broken team dynamic means we can’t create a compelling business model. How to mend a fracture when we have no choice but to carry on.

Our coaching sessions hold up a painful mirror to our behavioural patterns. We find the roots of our leadership challenges in our family stories. At our offsite theatre day we learn how these challenges can be the source of our inspiration and drive us to create and become something, we had no idea we were capable of.

Our experience at THNK takes place in a well-lit, white room, fourteen hours a day, for ten days, back-to-back. Pitches and experts and first time challenges are part of our daily rhythm. There is nowhere to hide. We collectively unravel more layers of ourselves, the extroverts become more introverts, the introverts, extroverts. And it feels amazing, because it brings us all magically closer together. There is a strange sense of loss that comes with going home.

My challenge topic at THNK is exploring the ‘Future of Education’. Our group designed a school programme for kids that covered four levels of being human; Mental, Physical, Emotional and Spiritual. THNK School of Creative Leadership already has them all covered.

Sometimes it takes a strong period of reflection to realize you’re learning something.  That sounds obvious, but I (we, perhaps?) spend so much of my days in rapidfire communication, flitting between e-mail(s), Twitter, blog(s), from account to account, from work to personal, until it all blends together. When you’ve lived your life that way for a long time, reflection becomes something for which you have to carve out time, carefully, thoughtfully.  It’s something I do in strange but solitary moments, often on airplanes and other dark places.

THNK (which I wrote a little bit about back in September), on the other hand, is days upon days of reflection.  It’s starting your day, sometimes exhausted both mentally and physically, and trudging in from the snow, and immediately smiling because someone shouts an inside joke at you or gives you a hug.  It’s talking with some of the world’s greatest young minds over vegetarian panda* soup and vegetarian tuna sandwiches.  It’s getting to sit at a table with a Dutch princess or a former Costa Rican president or a preeminent sci-fi writer.  It’s simultaneously loving and hating your project team member, then coming up a series of ridiculous ideas that, often suddenly, morph into something amazing.  It’s genuinely feeling a sense of longing for that group of new friends after you’ve left THNK HQ and Amsterdam behind for “real life.”

For me, these moments of realization come as sudden insights, amidst momentary periods of reflection: a short walk to the Espressofabriek after an intense team session, a short five minute “journaling” (or for me, bullet-point-making) session.  Sometimes, like me, they’re hyperverbal: I run through my thoughts aloud with someone, only to find, amidst them, what I didn’t know I was looking for.

And that’s the thing about reflection.  It doesn’t quite matter how you do it, everyone has their own approach.  It’s the outcome of looking inside yourself and realizing what it is you’ve been missing.  And what THNK does, for me, is enable that: through the people we’re put together with, the tools we’re given, the coaching we’re offered.

There is so much more to say, certainly, but that will require a deeper period of reflection

* I mean, if you’re going to make fake meat, why not go all out?

During past 3 years, Adriana has worked as an independent consultant focus on marketing, strategy and innovation, as well as a university teacher, mentoring business plans, making connections, exchanging ideas and taking advantage of her international live experience and professional background in business development of multinational companies, which include activities in São Paulo, Los Angeles, Mexico City and Geneva. Adriana´s vision is on education as base for social development, creativity as a resource for innovation and innovation as an strategy for sustainable development.

Vision, leadership and values to reach a better future and to succeed with a positive social contribution. It is THNK !

It is about being flexible to seek the balance for social and economic growth, it is about sustainability, shared value, creativity and innovation demanded by the current world wide scenario in order to surf the waves of changes, have fun and be happy.

Nowadays, creativity has been called also as a resource, such as information, energy and others but there is a unique characteristic on creativity that THNK, appropriately, takes in consideration: creativity is a human phenomenon, it is people on spot.

People that should know how to deal with diversity, multicultural perspectives, ambiguity, empowerment, to grow and harvest as part of one team, dealing with unpredictability and knowing how to apply new ideas with passion and purpose. THNK is made by people and for people who work with freedom and trust each other.

THNK itself is the implementation of a different mindset in the education field, it is creativity in place for innovation, it is flow bringing development through the “next generation of creative leaders that will have a significant societal impact in our world.”

I am glad to be THNK!

We blend very specific topics throughout the executive program to enable our corporate participants to constantly translate what they experience and learn in the program to their challenges into their work environment. These special courses are also open to all our other participants.

For more information, see Corporate Accelerator pdf.