Creativity at work.

The Artful Speaker is our most popular COCAbiz offering, because communication is critical. Take your presentation and storytelling skills to the next level with powerful workshops run by COCA Teaching Artists and Business Facilitators.

CRAFTING THE STORY
Because the story matters.
Learn how to move beyond jargon, using a narrative arc, metaphor and mystery to fully engage your audience, create human connection, and tell your story.

VISUAL COMMUNICATION
Because images make an impact.
Learn principles for selecting or creating visuals to bring the content of your presentation to life. A professional designer teaches strategies to simplify data, design infographics, and make your meaning powerfully clear through visual storytelling.

SPEAK THE SPEECH
Because delivery is key.
Work with a stage actor to build confidence, develop authentic presence, and manage nerves through breath, voice, posture, and gesture exercises. Learn to adapt your physical persona to engage authentically with audiences 5 to 500, as well as techniques to efficiently prepare.

Workshops can be provided individually or in combination.
Additional customized coaching sessions can be added.

Collaboration is integral in the modern workplace, and healthy teams are the bedrock of project success and organizational effectiveness. Let us take your teamwork to the next level by teaching innovative strategies that build resilience, team trust, and the safety to risk new ideas.

COCAbiz offers Creativity & Collaboration workshops to provide a shared experience that pushes participants out of their comfort zone, offering experience with tested processes for approaching opportunities that everyone can apply to real situations.

COLLABORATIVE DESIGN
Achieving a Common Goal with Design Thinking
Also known as human-centered design, design thinking is a process-based approach to problem solving often used in creative fields. Led by an experienced designer, participants learn the basics of design thinking and then work as a team to collaboratively vision and implement a creative solution tailored for a specific user.

RUBE GOLDBERG
Creative Problem Solving from Point A to Point Yellow
Real-world problems don’t come with an instruction manual. This workshop, led by a visual artist, introduces a “creative play” approach to collaboration. Participants implement those strategies as they team up to tackle a creative challenge: build the most complicated machine possible (a Rube Goldberg machine) to perform a simple task.

There are no quick and easy answers. Social change and community divisions centering on race, gender, generational change, immigration, and economic stratification challenge every organization. How do you create a welcoming culture that fosters a diverse workforce and fully engages the creativity and contribution of all employees?

COCAbiz offers Acting with Awareness not as a didactic presentation of the “right answers” or “correct behaviors.” Instead, the goal is to humanize differences, build self-awareness and empathy, and enhance workplace culture so everyone feels empowered to contribute and build a creative, inclusive and innovative organization, where everyone can do their best work.

ACTING WITH AWARENESS
Led by nationally-acclaimed improv and theatre teaching artists, Acting with Awareness is based on a progression of games, collaborative theatre
exercises, and reflective discussions that have been designed to surface questions that may be explored by participants themselves.

The program’s exercises can help bridge a wide variety of backgrounds, demographic characteristics, and cultures, using physical and non-verbal communications. Acting with Awareness is not designed as a “quick fix” or intervention for acute conflict situations, nor as a tutorial on diversity or bias, but rather as an opportunity to spark reflection and discovery.

BRAND U
Creating a Personal Leadership Brand
Consumers need a brand they can depend on. Leaders need a personal brand their employees can trust. Under the guidance of a veteran artist, participants work through an interactive learning experience using arts-based exercises to help build confidence, define and express their personal brand, and engage positively in unforeseen challenges while building team trust and relationships. Participants will develop their personal leadership brand through words, images, and physical exercises.

HIGH-SPEED CREATIVITY
Leading a Collaborative Culture
Improv actors are collaboration masters. Improv, or improvisational theatre, is a craft that demands spontaneity, being “present to partners,” and the ability to accept unexpected “offers” while building on one another’s ideas to create a performance. Through improv exercises, participants will learn to break through internal obstacles to achieve higher levels of collaboration and risk taking— without positional power. Create a culture that differentiates between need for procedural rigor and the need for balanced participation and iterating ideas.

DIRECTING THE ACTION
Productive Feedback for Creativity
Actors and directors know that feedback is key to turning a vision into a real successful performance. An experienced actor and director will use activities based on a director/actor relationship to reframe neutral observation and feedback as a core practice for both team members and formal leaders. Learn to achieve high performance while boosting engagement and creative contribution.

LEADING LADIES
Women in Leadership
Using current cultural research and the actor’s toolkit, professional actors/teaching artists will help you uncover the “character of your best self.” Through activities from the craft of acting, you will learn how your voice, body language, and intentions help shape people’s perceptions of you and perceptions of yourself. Experiment with authentic leadership presence, feedback techniques, networking tricks, and presentation skills. No matter the profession, this workshop is sure to help empower you to be the confident leader you are meant to be.