Linda Naiman

Linda Naiman is founder of Creativity at Work and helps organizations develop creativity, innovation, and leadership capabilities, through coaching, training and consulting. Linda advises senior leaders and their teams on building creative capacities, managing the creative process and fostering a culture of innovation.

As an educator and coach, Linda brings a multi-disciplinary approach to learning and development based on her background as an artist and designer: She leverages arts-based practices to spark creative inspiration, and design thinking to manage the creative process for innovation. Organizations that have sought out Linda for her expertise include the US Navy, GE, BASF, American Express, RBC, and Intel.

Linda’s first career was as a design consultant in marketing communications. A severe creative block led her to study creativity as a process for generating ideas—something she was never taught during six years of study at art and design schools. However she was taught to be a multi-disciplinary thinker, and began to explore questions such as, “What is the connection between art and leadership?” and “What we can learn from art that we can apply to business?”

This inquiry led to a newfound mission in 1995: To liberate creativity at work, and make life and work, a work of art. She started pioneering arts-based learning for business at this time and a few years later Arthur B VanGundy invited her to co-author an arts-based activity book for corporate trainers and facilitators: Orchestrating Collaboration at Work: Using Music, Improv, Storytelling, and Other Arts to Improve Teamwork was published by Wiley in 2003 and it was the first of its kind to examine the role of arts in business.

Linda’s work has been documented or cited in several books including: Artful Creation: Learning Tales of Arts-in-Business (Darsø 2004), Artbased Approaches: A Practical Handbook to Creativity at Work (Chemi 2006), and Wake Me Up When the Data Is Over: How Organizations Use Stories to Drive Results (Silverman 2006). She has been featured in The Vancouver Sun, The Globe and Mail, Profitguide.com, and Canadian Business Magazine. In 2011, IBM recognized Linda as a creative leader in business.

Linda holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from California College of the Arts and is a graduate of Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design.