Cara Turner
Growing Innovation
Igniting innovation to build a thriving, future-ready organisation
Innovation Coaching helps your team navigate a shifting landscape, guiding you to find new solutions and stay aligned with your vision and strategy.
I also support you in implementing flexible methodologies that improve your efficiency and responsiveness - key elements in a fast-changing world.
With my expertise in managing innovation projects, we’ll ensure your initiatives deliver impactful results, streamline your development processes and build leadership, all while keeping your tech strategy aligned with your overall vision.
About me
I build teams that thrive. I’m an impact-driven leader, blending innovation, creativity and leadership practices, to create cultures centred on learning and delivering - and having fun doing it.With over two decades of experience consulting across industries, I understand the unique challenges organisations face today.
I've coached, consulted and trained in small and large organisations from media to banking, and even founded a coding academy.So whether you're a startup navigating scaling challenges or an enterprise undergoing digital transformation, I'll help you build a future-ready organisation.
How I can help you thrive
Organisations succeed when they build a culture that supports innovation, and the flexibility to learn and adapt while delivering. With a unique blend of strategic vision, operational execution and a collaboration mindset, I'll help ensure that you foster exactly that.If you're looking to enhance your organisation's innovation capability, software leadership or organisational agility - let's chat!
Develop your innovation capacity and build thriving teams
Innovation Strategy
You need a living innovation strategy that reflects who you are as an organisation. We'll explore the landscape to create an innovation program to bring to life new ideas that reflect your vision, within your capacity.
Let's chat about getting you from hunch to innovation and implementation.
Innovation Workshops
You're stuck on a challenge: where to go next, or how to move forward with a stubborn problem.
Sometimes we need some out-of-the-box thinking to get us past the limits of our current approach.
This workshop will get your team exploring new options, and having fun doing it!
Effective Agility
Adopting and scaling agile practices present different challenges, and your teams need to deliver responsibly and perform at their best through each process. Whether they're onsite or remote, let's explore ways to improve collaboration, develop leaders, and build a culture where team members want to stay.
Latest Thinking
Medium is where I share my reflections on the challenges and opportunities we face as innovators and leaders, along with actionable strategies and useful resources.
Don't have an account? Read the posts anyway ->
Downloadable resources
Check out innovation and facilitation resources you can download to support your innovation journey.
Get in touch
Schedule a complimentary consultation or an introductory talk - or just connect, and let's embark on a journey of innovation.Whether you're a disruptive startup, an enterprise undergoing digital transformation, or want to optimise your operations, I’d love to explore how we can tackle your organisation’s needs.You can reach me through the contact form or drop me an email at the link below.
I'm available remotely or in person (Cape Town, South Africa).
Not on Medium? Click on the articles below to read the latest posts in full.
Introduction to agile practice
What is agile practice?
Equip your leadership team with the understanding of the problems that agile methodologies and practices are designed to address, how they do that, and where they fit with traditional management.
We'll discuss some of the myths, the WHY of agile and HOW it works, with plenty of time to discuss WHAT that might look like for your organisation.Duration: 60 - 90 minutes
Location: Online, or onsite in Cape Town.
Creative problem-solving workshops
See your challenges in a new light, with creative problem-solving!
Problem solving encompasses four key skills: critical thinking, analytical thinking, systems thinking and creative thinking.We spend a lot of time in the first three, but when we’re stuck on a stubborn problem everything feels like a roadblock, which makes it really hard to get to creative thinking.This interactive online workshop provides a framework to get you unstuck, and generate new ideas that resonate with you!Duration: Two hours
Location: Online, or onsite in Cape Town.
Check out the workshop details
The innovation journey
Introductory talk: What does innovation look like for you?
It's often hard to find time to explore the innovation process - and how to customise it to ensure an approach that works in your context.
This session provides an overview of how to create a living strategy, allowing ample time for discussion and questions.Duration: 60 minutes
Location: Online, or on-site in Cape Town.
Innovation Strategy
Create a strategy that links vision and growth objectives with emerging opportunities - and accommodates change. Build a well-balanced portfolio of novel initiatives unique to your organisation's current reality, including the small changes that boost productivity and build customer loyalty and larger initiatives that truly set your offerings apart.Duration: Build a living strategy with actionable initiatives in two one-day workshops.
De-risk breakthrough ideas with design thinking, from one dedicated week to two months.
Implement into your roadmap aligned with your planning cycles.
Location: Online, or on-site in Cape Town.
Get the Open Space Posters
I've made the Open Space posters available as a free download here: Growing Innovation Open Space Posters.
The posters have a QR code linked to this page, to make it easy for others to access these resources.
And I'd love to hear about how you've used them!
Support your innovation journey with an Open Space unconference - posters
Sometimes in our innovation journey we land up with lots of different things happening at once, with different people experimenting with different tools in different ways. This is the case with a lot of AI innovation efforts. It's really great to experiment like this for a while, but it can lead in all sorts of different directions, so we need a way to harvest that learning.Open Space Technology is a form of unconference that is perfect for this purpose.
In short, an Open Space unconference is an agreement to spend focused time delving into a key theme that matters to a group, but without planning a specific agenda beforehand.Instead, the agenda is set a the start by the participants. This ensures that each session is led by someone who cares about it - even if it's something they don't know well, but want to learn about it from others in the group.To make this format work, there are a few guidelines designed to ensure that people show up in curiosity, and participate in the best way for them, without anyone else saying how that should be.Visual posters help to keep these principles top of mind for everyone, especially people who are new to Open Space. I recently helped a friend with their internal Open Space unconference, and shared these posters with them.
The innvoation journey
A short walk through the innovation process & phases, and what to expect for running a design thinking program in your organisation.
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Creative problem-solving
This two hour workshop equips your teams with tools for flexible thinking, helping them find new approaches to stubborn challenges.
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Introduction to agile practice
A short talk with lots of discussion, helping your leadership team make sense of agile practice and how it can support your teams.
read more