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Motivating keynotes that boost your innovative mindset

Cyriel Kortleven

travels from Belgium

Global speaker on Change Mindset, Innovation and Creativity

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5 out of 5 stars

"Cyriel delivered one of the best conference talks I've ever seen.”

- Ben Flavel - co-founder at CheckinLine (Australia) See all references
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Speaker Cyriel Kortleven is on a mission in life: boosting the creative & entrepreneurial mindset of leaders & professionals faced with change. With almost 20 years of hands-on experience in the domain of creativity and innovation, he has inspired organisations in 25 different countries on 5 continents. He’s one of the 35 people in the world who has received a Global Speaking Fellows award . Some words that always come back from the participants: ‘Inspiring’, ‘Fun’ ‘Pragmatic tools and tips’ and ‘Lots of energy’.

Why book speaker Cyriel Kortleven?

  • An innovator himself, speaker Cyriel inspires audience members on what and how far their creativity and innovative ideas will go with his engaging keynote and exercises.
  • Speaker Cyriel stays ahead of the times as he’s an expert in boosting the creative and entrepreneurial mindsets of successful professionals in any changing environment.
  • He understands the setbacks as it is relayed to audience members. Speaker Cyriel demonstrates how to identify and debunk the misfortune of our thoughts. Cyriel will free your creative mind in efforts to amplifying your personal life and career.

“Don’t mind the change, change your mind.” -Speaker Cyriel Kortleven

Speaker Cyriel is an award-winning global keynote speaker for conferences, client events and leadership development meetings.  Cyriel’s mission is about reaching your most important strategic goals by engaging your employees to do things differently; reducing natural risk aversion and stimulating a more entrepreneurial mindset; offering pragmatic tools and language to open essential conversations on innovation and change. Speaker Cyriel Kortleven has worked with clients like Bayer, IKEA, Nike, Pfizer, Unilever and many more to make their big events and conferences a great success. 

As a keynote speaker Cyriel Kortleven is the living embodiment of engagement, using a lot of interaction and humor. He is a simplifier who delivers a simple, pragmatic message and leaves his audience with helpful tools and useful language. Cyriel excels in an international context with audiences from all over the world. It’s no wonder that Cyriel belongs to a select group of 35 people in the world who are Global Speaking Fellows:  An award for speakers who have spoken across the Globe and demonstrate a high degree of speaking expertise and cultural awareness in global markets. He has already inspired organisations in 25 different countries on five continents and is the author of five successful business books. 

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Keynote by speaker Cyriel Kortleven

The Change Mindset – Survival kit for professionals in change

Every day, we’re confronted with new challenges: global competition; demanding clients; new technologies; … We need professionals who dare to leave their comfort zone and suspend their judgement. We need professionals who explore the world from a different perspective and can turn problems into opportunities. We need professionals who get into action and who aren’t scared to fail fast, often and forward by experimenting with BaNano actions. Are you one of those professionals?

In this interactive and entertaining presentation, you will get the spark, tools and language to influence others to be more creative & entrepreneurial and give a big boost to your own Change Mindset. Yes And Act … Now.

  • Boost the creative & entrepreneurial mindset of yourself & your colleagues
  • New language that will reduce the resistance to change 
  • Simple and pragmatic tools to suspend your judgement & broaden your perspective 
  • Explore the power of a BaNaNo-actions and dare to fail more to get more success 
  • The whole audience gets access to a digital handout with slides and tool cards with ideakillers & boosters
Keynote by speaker Cyriel Kortleven

Crossing Borders – What can your organization learn from other industries & other surprising resources?

During this entertaining and inspiring presentation, you will explore a simple process & concrete tools to ‘translate’ solutions from different industries & other surprising resources to your own business. Speaker Cyriel will boost your skills to broaden your perspective, and give you tips and tools to use out-of-the-ordinary resources to discover new ideas.

  • A simple process & concrete tools to learn from different industries and uncommon resources 
  • Discover inspiring examples of how other industries have solved your challenges 
  • Skills to switch your perspective and broaden your reality 
  • Break fixed barriers between departments and industries 
  • Unlock the creative potential to solve challenges in your organisation
Keynote by speaker Cyriel Kortleven

Break, Burn or Ban The Box

In several studies, creativity comes back as one of the most important skills for all business professionals. In essence, creativity means solving problems in original ways. In this interactive presentation, we will focus on how you can break fixed thinking patterns. You will get hands-on tips and tricks to give your creativity (and of your colleagues) a big boost. You will be amazed by how fast your brain will switch to the automatic pilot of pattern-thinking. You get six simple and practical tools to stimulate creativity in your daily (work)life. 

  • Understand why human beings love to think in patterns 
  • Learn 6 creative skills to generate hundreds of ideas in a short amount of time 
  • Unlock your creative potential (& stimulate others to do the same) 
  • Build a more innovative culture at work 
  • Access to my handout slides, 7 inspiration-movies, tool card with ideakillers & boosters.
Keynote by speaker Cyriel Kortleven

Less is Beautiful

‘Less is Beautiful’ … We live in a society with an abundance of products and services, connections, technologies, information but a downside is that we almost get paralyzed by the choices and possibilities (burn-outs, stress and less and less time for the real important things in life). 

There aren’t a lot of examples of how professionals in organisations and governments can apply ‘Less is Beautiful’ to their daily practice. Get inspired by loads of examples from very different industries and learn how you can apply three simple principles to experience ‘less is more’: start to stop, simplify and letting go. This presentation gives you insights into the exaggerated search for efficiency, the paradox of choice, and very concrete examples and tools to apply ‘Less is Beautiful’ to your professional lives. 

  • Become aware of the paradox of choice and the power of 3 principles
  • Start to Stop – discover the power of focus and learn how stopping activities can lead to more time, money and energy 
  • Simplify – learn simple methods to ban complexity 
  • Letting go – dare to trust again and create space and time in your professional life 
  • Get a lot of inspiring examples of how ‘less’ can succeed in business
Cyriel Kortleven - video

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References

Cyriel worked with the Belgian Unilever Change Leaders on innovative and creative thinking. He delivered a splendid and energizing keynote presentation and afterwards facilitated a workshop in which we developed new ideas and solutions for some Unilever challenges. A great experience.

Sabine Blanchet - Country HR manager

Unilever

Cyriel is able to apply enormous amounts of creativity to his sessions. Whether it's about behaviour, strategy, team-spirit or out-of-the-box-thinking, it's always worthwhile exchanging thoughts with Cyriel!

Peter Lathouwers - Europe Business Intelligence Director

Nike

Cyriel delivered one of the best conference talks I've ever seen.

Ben Flavel - co-founder

CheckinLine (Australia)
12.09.2019

The 3-minute rule - kill the idea killers

Do you want to get rid of these idea killers during a meeting. Then apply the 3-minute rule. Global speaker Cyriel Kortleven is an expert in Creativity & the Change Mindset. He'll give you a simple tip plus a concrete tool to make sure that everybody will suspend their judgement.

Expressions like ‘Yes but’, ‘We don’t have time’, ‘No budget’ are perfect excuses to kill new ideas. For
that reason, use the three-minute rule in combination with the idea killers poster.

I guarantee you that this exercise will help you to double or triple the number of ideas that you have
during a meeting (if you apply the exercise in the right way ;-)). Human beings have a tendency to
criticize and judge new things. It happens in a fraction of a second where our brain looks at the new
idea and compares it with previous experiences. And if there’s a big difference between the new idea
and the things that it knows, it blocks the idea because it doesn’t fit in the picture.
There are a lot of (sometimes good) reasons why we do this: being afraid to go out of our comfort
zone, we only see the downside of the idea, we expect that the new idea will cost a lot of money, and
will take a lot of time, … We call all these reasons idea killers. All kind of expressions that are meant
to keep the status quo and make sure that we don’t have to change. You can download a poster with
idea killers via this link: https://www.ideakillers.net

The three-minute rule works as follows: explain your colleagues in the meeting that humans don’t like
to suspend their judgement but it’s a necessary skill if you want to get new ideas. For that reason, you
invite them -for three minutes – to get into the yes and mindset. Instead of responding with an idea
killer to a new idea, they have to answer with ‘Yes and …’ where you accept the idea and you even
add something to it. It might be very interesting to put a print of the idea killer-poster on the table
before you start.
During the 3 minutes, no judgement is allowed and quantity is more important than quality at that
moment. If somebody comes up with an idea killer during the three minutes, you can point to the idea
killers poster. The punishment for killing one idea is to come up with two new ideas. You will notice
that in three minutes, you will have a lot more ideas than in a normal meeting-setting – probably also
some crazy ideas but that’s not a problem because you don’t need to implement all of them. Maybe
you can use some elements of an idea that might be feasible and combine different small ideas to
one or two good ones. Another big advantage of this method is that everybody has a chance to
contribute so the chance that the idea will be implemented in reality also grows substantially.
Just give it a try! Good luck …

PS: Don’t use this yes and … rule all the time, only for some of the topics where creative ideas are
needed (probably only 5 – 10 % of the topics on the agenda). There’s nothing wrong with judging (we
would go crazy if we had to think in an open, yes and -mindset all the time) but use it wisely when the
need for alternative solutions is high.

See keynotes with Cyriel Kortleven
Non-binding request for Cyriel Kortleven

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Cyriel Kortleven
Cyriel Kortleven

5 out of 5 stars

"Cyriel delivered one of the best conference talks I've ever seen.”

- Ben Flavel - co-founder at CheckinLine (Australia) See all references

Keynote topics with Cyriel Kortleven