• Business development
• Creativity & innovation
• Healthy orgainisation
• Motivation
• Public speaking anxiety
• See yourself differently
• Uk economy

After just returning from delivering a business development programme to Turkish SMEs under contract from the European Union, we feel compelled to share with you our experience. We knew the trip would present some challenges, firstly communication was a topic that was being covered but the main fear was that the language barrier would present significant problems that the message would not be delivered effectively. All this made the design process complex but exciting as we love a challenge.

At Developing Impact we pride our innovative approach to training but would this be accepted in Turkey? We decided to tone down the delivery for the first day to gauge its acceptance and to adopt a flexible approach for the forthcoming days. 

The first day we delivered communication and leadership development programmes. The delegates’ participation and interaction was encouraging and showed a great appetite to learn and develop. Often on visiting foreign countries you can be greeted with a sea of faces with little or no interaction. This is not conducive with an effective learning programme. With the delegates on side we probed to discover a deeper level of understanding about the Turkish culture and how the material could impact on their results.

The delegates really enjoyed the whole experience and their positive feedback acted as a springboard to our second delivery. We knew that talking about innovation would require their participation to flex their lateral thinking skills and push their creative boundaries. We made it clear; the only rule today is there are no rules! This excited them as they set out to discover new learning’s on creativity and innovation.

We introduced group puzzles, individual exercises and interactive games to show the power of synergy if managed correctly. We talked about how to manage these meetings, why we should praise innovators and welcome failure. The enthusiasm and desire to achieve success ensured the impact of the learning experience was far more successful than we could of dreamed of.

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