About BSG

Curriculums

BSG Applied Improvisation Model

BSG improvisational curriculums are based on a model of leadership and management competencies necessary to address ambiguity, constant change, and uncertainty.  Given our global experience and significant academic research, we believe six key competencies are critical for continued organizational success.  We’ve found that in a hyper-competitive environment, firms with exemplary leadership, collaboration, communication, team-building, and creativity skills rise to the top.

Our curriculums use focused group activities that leverage nine fundamental AIM principles to enhance specific management competencies. This management skill improvement can lead to direct improvements in business performance and organizational capabilities.  Our curriculums address the management aspects of the skill, the value proposition importance of that skill, and the variety of participant perspectives while adhering to key instructional components, evaluation metrics, and supplemental materials.

Leadership

Organizations require leadership.

Leaders create a vision and motivate people to accomplish this vision. Commitment and competency are essential.  Leaders establish operating values, and the best leaders inspire everyone in an organization to reach their full potential.  While countless books, articles, dissertations, and other works have been written on leadership, the definition has challenged authors for centuries.  The best we’ve found is from Kevin Kruses:

“Leadership is a process of social influence, which maximizes the efforts of others towards the achievement of a goal.”

Leaders occur at all levels of an organization. They can have many qualities and may take different approaches and styles.  While some leaders are born, they can be made. Leadership skills can be increased, techniques enhanced to embrace complex situations, and competencies improved.  Effective leadership is considered the most critical success factor in business success.

AIM is a superb learning method to quickly and efficiently improve leadership, identify emerging leaders, empower others, and help staff better understand the role of leadership in organizational success.  AIM-based leadership programs can improve morale, boost staff engagement, help build connectedness, inspire confidence, and enable innovation.

BSG conceptualizes, designs, and develops AIM programs to increase leadership capabilities for individuals at all organizational levels.  Our programs draw from an extensive library of materials that enable staff to improve their leadership skill level, explore and broaden their leadership style, and develop specific leadership competencies for unique situations.  BSG has created curriculum materials for the following eleven critical leadership topics that can be undertaken individually or in some consolidated manner.

  • Organizational Leadership
  • Presence & Credibility
  • Stakeholder Alignment & Management
  • Embodying & Changing Organizational Culture
  • Situational Response
  • Encouraging Diversity & Inclusivity
  • Productive Negotiation
  • Accepting Feedback & Open Mindedness
  • Adaptability & Flexibility
  • Leading Without Authority
  • Decision Making

Team Building

Good leaders build high-performing teams.

The formation and effective operation of high-performing teams are among the most critical of organizational functions.  Leaders are not solo practitioners.  The interrelated actions of others realize their vision and the accomplishment of objectives.  This is a direct function of a team’s capacity to work together.  Team members complement each other, adopt different roles in varying settings, and share credit.  Teams that understand the strength and weaknesses of each individual team member help provide balance, consistency, and the good sense to operate in uncertain situations.

“Team building is an ongoing and well thought through process of discovering each team member’s competencies, commitment, and character designed to increase motivation, promote cooperation, and achieve goals.”

AIM is a superb experiential learning method to efficiently build and improve teams.  When undertaken by experienced facilitators with well-defined objectives, AIM can illuminate individual strengths and weaknesses.  It helps individuals become more self-aware of their capabilities and how they can better contribute to achieving team objectives.  Such programs can also identify emerging leaders and illustrate how to empower teammates.

BSG conceptualizes, designs, and develops AIM programs to improve team function for all organizational levels.  Our programs draw from an extensive material archive that enables individuals to increase their skill level, build trust, explore, and develop and broaden their participatory style.  A team’s success or failure primarily lies in how well its members trust each other. They must collaborate, effectively convey their ideas, and address and resolve conflict.  BSG has created curriculum materials for seven critical team-building topics and can deliver them individually or in a consolidated manner.

  • Achieving Group Synergy
  • Building Mutual Trust
  • Coaching
  • Managing & Resolving Conflict
  • Sharing the Spotlight & Giving Credit
  • Seeking Common Ground & Consensus Building
  • Instilling Accountability

Collaboration

High-performing teams collaborate.

Teams working toward a shared goal become effective when they master the art of collaboration.  The ability to cooperate and share ideas in a respectful, safe, and open environment enables teams to achieve better results in less time and with fewer resources.  In addition to critical business benefits, team members generate personal pride by collaborating and gain a greater sense of fulfillment that improves retention.  Collaboration supports learning, management development, and achievement of personal growth. 

“Collaboration is a group of people or entities coming together and contributing their expertise for the benefit of a shared objective, project, or mission.”

Corey Moseley writes, “Effective collaboration helps us problem solve, satisfies a human need to bring people closer together, helps people learn from each other, opens up new channels for communication; boosts morale across an organization, and makes us more efficient and effective workers.

AIM is an ideal method to learn, develop, and apply a wide range of collaborative skills that are vital to business success.  Experienced instructors implement an educational plan based on improvisational principles to quickly improve collaborative working skills, build group trust, and heighten the level of cooperation among staff members.

Our AIM programs encourage the creation of collaboration techniques that assist businesses, universities, and healthcare institutions with improving internal working relationships.  The skills of cooperation can be further applied outside the organization to increase networking capabilities for both the individual and the organization.

BSG conceptualizes, designs, and develops AIM programs to increase collaboration skills.  Our programs engage a wide range of activities to illustrate the value of collaboration, how to give and take, and how to build on others’ ideas.  BSG has created curriculum materials for the following eight critical collaboration topics that can be delivered individually or in a consolidated manner.

  • Cooperating (Collaboration) With Others
  • Leading & Working Remotely
  • Creating a High Value Network (External)
  • Building Working Relationships (Internal)
  • Reading the Room
  • Assertion & Restraint
  • Cultivating Humility
  • Encouraging Camaraderie

Creativity / Innovation

Teams collaborate to create, innovate, and transform.

Today’s business environment is changing at an accelerating pace.  Companies must continually adapt, sharpen competitive differentiation, hone business strategies, and refine service and product portfolios.  This requires systematic innovation in ever-shortening periods.

“Innovation is a multi-level process where organizations transform ideas into new products, services, or processes, to advance, compete and differentiate themselves.”

The need for ongoing improvement is an established competitive tenet. Novel products have always needed to be faster, better, cheaper, or different.  What has changed, however, is both the pace and who is responsible.  Gone are the days when a unique business unit had responsibility for “innovation.” Today, every employee must be creative and help identify strategic, process, organizational, or technical improvements.  These can range from game-changing strategic innovations to simple improvements in day-to-day operations.  And this vital business competency can be both learned and improved.

AIM is a powerful tool for learning the basics of idea generation and creativity.  It illustrates the critical business processes of execution, communication, change management, and transformation.  Staff who understand the challenges of these innovation processes emerge as potent change agents within their firms.

BSG conceptualizes, designs, and develops AIM programs to improve and enhance innovation and change management skills.  Our programs offer a wide range of activities to illustrate the challenges of organizational change, how to anticipate objections, and how to create and implement new products and services.  BSG has established curriculum materials for the following seven critical collaboration topics and can deliver them individually or in a consolidated manner.

  • Agility & Adaptive Development
  • Brainstorming & Ideation
  • Design Thinking
  • Change Management
  • Creative Problem Solving
  • Curiosity
  • Recovery From Failure

 

Communication

Communication is vital to Innovation.

Innovation fails without productive communication.  Open, transparent, and honest communication is vital to business collaboration.  Effective communication allows others to quickly and accurately understand information; poor communication skills lead to frequent misunderstandings and frustration.

“Communication is the exchange of ideas, thoughts, opinions, knowledge, and data to convey and receive a message with clarity and purpose.  When we communicate effectively, both the sender and receiver understand and feel satisfied.”

Successful communication is a priority in any business endeavor. For communication to be effective, it must be clear, complete, concise, and compassionate. Communication is not agreement, nor is agreement always necessary in a business situation.  One can always agree to disagree.  But understanding a message and both its intellectual and emotional intent enables innovation.

Research has shown that body language plays an important role in conversation.  Communication is 55% non-verbal, 38% vocal (tone and inflection), and 7% words.  Up to 93% of communication, then, does not involve what is said.  Stress, competing business visions, personality, prejudices, and political differences can interfere with productive dialog.  All can create misunderstanding and frustration, resulting in unnecessary and costly errors.

AIM is a powerful tool for learning how to communicate with clarity, empathy, and understanding.  Through interactive AIM programs that stress active listening, considering one’s audience, and message brevity, participants learn how to convey a message so it is received with its intended meaning.

BSG conceptualizes, designs, and develops AIM programs to improve individual and team-based communication and presentation skills.  Our programs utilize a wide range of activities to illustrate and help participants understand their communication style and how to improve and enhance their exchanges in a business setting.  BSG has created curriculum materials for the following seven critical communication topics that can be delivered individually or in a consolidated manner.

  • Situational Communications (Authenticity)
  • Active Listening & Responsiveness
  • Speaking in the Moment
  • Difficult Conversations
  • Civil Discourse & Interpersonal Sensitivity
  • Non-Verbal Communications
  • Persuasion & Influence

Emotional Awareness

Innovation requires personal connections.

Emotional awareness improves how people connect.  Each individual is a social being, no matter how capable, competent, or skilled.  But we can achieve more meaningful goals by working together.  Strong relationships are often the glue that holds teams together and enable the weathering of economic downturns, organizational impediments, and other business setbacks.  Strong relationships are built on a “give and take.”  Team members must be able to take care of others and be taken care of by others.

“Emotional awareness is the ability to connect, to recognize and make sense of not just your own emotions, but also those of others.”

Emotional awareness, aptitude, or intelligence is crucial for strengthening business connections.  Empathizing with another person, be it a superior, subordinate, colleague, or competitor, creates understanding and closeness.  Such attachment facilitates the achievement of personal and organizational goals.  When you build emotional aptitude, difficult situations are easier to handle.  Individual and team self-esteem are produced, which directly benefit the accomplishment of corporate goals.

Effective teams, whether in sports, family, or business, recognize and acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of each individual and compensate accordingly.  Allocation of workload is done according to skill and capability.  Such teams work with and help each other, sharing responsibility for both success and failure.  Such division of effort requires emotional aptitude, which can be developed, nurtured, and learned.

Emotional aptitude is commonly divided into four categories – self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management – that, when combined, lead to more effective professional collaborations.  As such, our AIM facilitators are acutely aware of the necessity of strong relationships in a work environment. 

BSG conceptualizes, designs, and develops AIM programs to improve emotional aptitude in business teams.  Our programs utilize a wide range of activities to illustrate and help participants understand how they react in challenging and difficult interpersonal situations.  BSG has created curriculum materials for the following ten critical emotional aptitude topics that can be delivered individually or in a combined integrated fashion.

  • Authenticity
  • Story Telling
  • Leveraging Emotion
  • Cross Cultural & Multinational Awareness 
  • Interpersonal Equity (Equality & Diversity)
  • Ethics & Integrity
  • Embracing Empathy
  • Igniting Enthusiasm 
  • Self-Regulation
  • Being Present & Self Awareness