When I was interviewed for the post of Training and Development Manager for the Creative Pioneer Programme I can remember being asked whether I thought that creatives required particular approaches or training techniques. I answered very emphatically “No”, and while I still stand by that answer, my answer is now "No, but".

It is always dangerous to generalise, of course, but the "but" rests for me in the area of self-confidence versus self-belief. By this I mean that the creative people I have worked with all have strong self-belief in the medium that they work in, their skills as practitioners, their level of ambition and the impact they want and feel able to make with their work. Their confidence that they will be able to achieve that is often very low, this leads to a very strong tension, and can lead to paralysis – it is better to do nothing than fail.  Overcoming this is the key and tends to be the focus of much of my training delivery. I have tackled it through developing a coaching style of delivery and very often just through the simple technique of "naming" it.

In developing training programmes, briefing other trainers and delivering material myself I have learnt about and used lots of different approaches, and I am sure most trainers have incorporated elements of these in to their work: Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences or Five Minds for the Future; Myers Briggs Type Indicator and Honey and Mumford. This is of course, about being a professional and ensuring you create a dynamic programme suitable to the group you will be working with.

The question I return to when preparing material for any group is "what is the edge" – where is there a lack of confidence, or comfort, what needs to be developed here and to support the amelioration of this edge.  When working in other sectors, the "edge" might be to develop a more creative approach to problem solving, or develop the confidence of the staff in their creative skills – in which case my approach will include a lot of creative training techniques. When the "edge" is commercialising creativity, building a business around their own talent, having the confidence to charge people for a creative product or service, negotiation with venues, galleries, clients, then the "edge" about understanding the client’s needs and how to reassure them of the positive benefits of their work. So my approach will be to develop the skills of empathy, how to communicate in a different language to their aesthetic one.  The need to bring the audience/customer/client/buyer in to the creative process and to find ways to develop a relationship with them, rather than insist on one is key, and an aspect I spend a lot of time on when developing business skills. 

The following have been useful techniques to ensuring that the materials are appropriate make a strong impact and take the participants on the transformative journey they have engaged with, or simply teach them some necessary facts and approaches:

• Relevant, applicable now and credible.
• Many creative people have a very particular “working memory”, engaging with this is key and there are a range of techniques that can support this:
• Multi-sensory approaches to learning – ensuring the auditory, visual and kinaesthetic elements reinforce one another;
• Ensuring that they timetable, agenda and learning objectives are very clear so the structure is articulated and unambiguous – the structure can then allow for creativity to take place;
• Ensuring that the participants become, if they are not already, aware of the way they learn and can influence the programme’s delivery style and – more importantly – transfer this to other situations;

• Creative people often use “global logic and reasoning strategies” so it is may be important to capture the whole picture, and relate every element clearly to that, rather than working through a process in a set of sequential steps. To support that I use:
• Mindmapping – I often present training sessions through a mindmap rather than a more linear powerpoint – allowing participants to see the whole journey as well as the individual elements;
  
• Encouraging participants to feel more comfortable with "closure"; in Myers Briggs terms many artists and designers tend to be “perceivers” – they are great at generating alternatives, at being flexible and will tend to prefer to keep their options open. Developing the preference to create and respond to deadlines and to make a decision quickly has been an important element to include.