Workshops
Story-based experiences for seeing differently,
thinking flexibly, and creating new possibilities.
I design experiential workshops that use story, metaphor, imaginative play, and reflection to help people step outside familiar patterns and explore questions from somewhere new.
Rather than simply talking about creativity or collaboration, participants experience different ways of thinking and working and leave with insights, language, and practices they can carry back into real life.
Workshops for Organizations & Teams
When the way we work is changing, imagination gives us another way to see.
Creative Lift workshops create space for teams to step outside the habits and assumptions of everyday work. Through experiential, story-based processes, participants explore how they think, how they work together, and what else might be possible.
Individual Cognitive Flexibility
THINK OTHERWISE
How many ways do you know how to think?
Think Otherwise invites participants to notice the different modes they bring to their work and experiment with moving between them more intentionally.
Through an imaginative, story-based experience, participants explore the relationship between their creative and professional modes, shift between making and reflection, and discover what becomes possible when they approach familiar work from somewhere new.
Participants practice:
- shifting perspective
- moving between modes of thought
- noticing personal patterns
- carrying insight back into real work
60–90 minutes · In person or virtual · Adaptable for group size and context
THINK OTHERWISE · NVIDIA
Adding my own characters into the frameworks I’d already been learning about really stuck with me. I became more conscious of those two sides of myself, and I’ve carried that awareness into both my work and my own personal creativity. The exercise really helped me make the ideas my own.
TEAM CULTURE & COLLABORATION
CREATING LIFT
Every team creates more than its visible work.
Creating Lift helps teams make the “work beneath the work” visible: the environment they create through their roles, relationships, expectations, and ways of working together.
Through a facilitated metaphor-mapping process, teams imagine the experience of working together as a place or shared experience—a jazz ensemble, a base camp, a research lab—and use that metaphor to see familiar questions from somewhere new.
Then they turn the metaphor back toward real life, exploring what it suggests about roles, collaboration, culture, and the experience they want to create for others.
Teams leave with:
- shared language
- a vivid team metaphor
- practical commitments to test
- an imaginative tool they can return to as the team changes
Approximately 2 hours · In person or virtual · Customized for your organizational context
Why Story and Imagination:
Sometimes the easiest way to see a familiar situation differently is to step outside it.
In my workshops, metaphor gives participants another vantage point. An idea might become an object. Different modes of thought might become characters. A team’s culture might become a place we can explore together.
By stepping into an imagined frame, participants can experiment, notice patterns, and encounter possibilities that may be difficult to see from inside the familiar situation.
Then comes the move that matters most: bringing what they discover back into real life.
Workshops Across Contexts
The same imaginative principles can be adapted for many kinds of rooms.
Over more than twenty years, I’ve designed and facilitated creative experiences for writers, educators, students, leaders, teams, arts organizations, schools, and communities.
Workshops can be customized for:
- Team retreats and off-sites
- Professional development and learning programs
- Schools and educational organizations
- Arts and creative organizations
- Conferences and community gatherings
- Custom organizational needs
Have something particular in mind? I’d love to connect about what would best serve your group.
VIRTUAL WORKSHOPS · SCBWI
I can’t stop talking about the sessions Naomi Kinsman did for our region. I had heard wonderful things about her in-person workshops, but I wasn’t prepared for how impactful her virtual sessions would be. Going through her methods in my own workspace was incredibly powerful and has made it easier to revisit her techniques in my creative work. Her methods have given me a direct route to creating more freely, joyfully, and effectively. Feedback from attendees has also been fantastic.
Let's Explore What's Possible
Whether you’re planning a team retreat, navigating change, building creative capacity, or looking for a different way into an important conversation, I’d be glad to explore what might serve your group.
Workshops can be facilitated in person or virtually and adapted for your goals, context, and group size.
Looking for a workshop you can attend yourself? See upcoming workshops & events →
Notes from the Field
Essays and observations about imagination, creative practice, story, and the work of becoming.