Workshops for Teams and Office Groups

Hello, I’m Kim

A Creative Workshop Facilitator

in vancouver, bc, canada

 

let’s shake things loose

Mighty Ugly workshops for professional groups and teams are a hands-on adventure in flouting our usual goals and expectations. Here, we do not strive for perfection or even for good-enough. In making something ugly on purpose we open our minds, gain perspective, and think differently. Together.

Success

When the goal is to make something hideous, what does success look like? And what do we learn about our usual processes when we turn the usual goal on its head?

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Failure

A hidden part of striving for success is that we constantly avoid failure. Striving for failure for just an hour or two can be downright liberating. Or at least insightful, and certainly engaging.

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Feedback

As team members and collaborators, we’re keen to provide constructive feedback to our coworkers, supervisors and reports. But when the goal is backwards what do we say?

Benefits to teams & Individuals

Mighty Ugly workshops are not what folks expect to do in their office. Participants come away

  • having shared a hilarious, playful and challenging experience with their coworkers;
  • appreciating creative disruption and the perspective it can lend;
  • with new perspective on how they can approach projects and problems with an eye on being agile and on iterating; and
  • with a fresh take on how feedback and communication affect problem-solving and brainstorming as a team.

Workshop facilitator Kim Werker is the author of Make It Mighty Ugly: Exercises & Advice for Getting Creative Even When It Ain’t Pretty.

The book is based on the workshops she has led with individuals and groups around North America since 2010. Part arts-and-crafts, part exploration of creativity and creative blocks, Mighty Ugly helps individuals and teams break out of ruts and see projects with fresh eyes and renewed enthusiasm.

Workshops for Teams and Office Groups

Invite your team to fail, Just this once.

I’ll help.

A hands-on crafty time

Using scrap materials, glue-guns, scissors and markers, participants get their hands dirty (or maybe just a little bit sticky) crafting an ugly creature – not cute-ugly, ugly-ugly.

Workshops for Teams and Office Groups
Workshops for Teams and Office Groups
Workshops for Teams and Office Groups
Workshops for Teams and Office Groups

With conversation and show-and-tell

Depending on your needs, we can keep things light and fun, or delve more deeply into the importance of embracing mistakes and failure, of trying again, and of examining the decisions we make when we embark upon any kind of project.

Where failure’s kinda pretty.

Mighty Ugly is about gaining strength, resilience and perspective from shifting our expectations for a short time. Whether participants find it uncomfortable or liberating or a bit of both, they’re always glad they did it. Give your team the shared experience of working hard to fail spectacularly. It’ll be sure to provide fodder for the water cooler for days and weeks to come!

Workshops for Teams and Office Groups
Workshops for Teams and Office Groups

Invite your team to make something Mighty Ugly.
It’s fun, challenging, engaging & memorable.

Testimonials

“I don’t think I, or the others who attended, really knew what kind of creative challenge we were getting into when we had Kim facilitate a Mighty Ugly workshop. Culturally enforced perfectionism, ego, and more were kicked out the door through thoughtful conversation about what it means to make and the actual process of cobbling together scraps to achieve the worst possible outcome. A creative feat of its own, our hideous creatures became avatars for the real ‘us’ behind our projected Instagrammable identities and helped us reach new creative thinking and problem-solving potential in mere hours.”

Isaac Watson
Executive Producer, Kickass Conferences

“People raved about Kim’s Make It Mighty Ugly workshop. How it was fun, harder than you would think and liberating to try to make something ugly. Making is something we all love to do but the pressure we put on ourselves to always make it pretty takes some of the joy out of making. Kim can help you look at making again as a process that can bring a lot of joy, which is what it’s all about, right?”

Kristen Rask
Head Crafter, Urban Craft Uprising

Let’s do this.