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4 Ways to Address or Avoid Major Strategic Issues

Published on June 27, 2018 by Mike Brown in Brainzooming - All Posts, Collaboration, Communication, Performance, Strategic Thinking, Tools


This matrix on 4 ways your organization can deal with major issues is DEFINITELY courtesy of the Brainzooming R&D lab.

Going back through notes and strategic planning posters from previous client engagements, I came across a big easel sheet. It was used during a particularly long and particularly challenging strategic planning workshop. The notes all pertained to tackling elephant in the room issues. These are issues inside an organization that everyone knows about (and will discuss in private) but that are NEVER discussed in meetings or any type of formal group setting. For this organization, which was undergoing a significant transition, many years of micro-managing resulted in at least one huge page’s worth of elephant in the room issues.


That combination of knowing and discussing major issues led me to wonder: What are all the potential combinations of an organization knowing and discussing major strategic issues? That thought experiment is played out in this matrix. You can see the elephants in the room in the lower right. Blind spots are in the lower left; these are the issues in the organization that are narrowly known and discussed. Failing to uncover issues the organization (and especially its leadership) doesn’t know, but that are very real, typically poses a significant threat.

Speculation occurs when there is a lot of chatter about issues that some might suspect, but for which most of the organization lacks any solid facts.

The upper right – the best quadrant – is transparency, where there is a reasonable balance between knowledge and discussion about major issues within an organization.

Did I mention that his was from the Brainzooming R&D lab? We haven’t used this matrix about major strategic issues in any formal ways yet. The first use will likely take place with an organization dealing with poor communication and a negative environment. We might use it before or during a strategic planning workshop to better understand where major issues are landing. If you do anything with this matrix ahead of that, we’d love to know what you think.

One Final Note: While this matrix is discussed in the context of an organization, it relates to other situations, particularly couples and families, at least based on being able to readily identify interpersonal behaviors within the matrix. So, maybe try it out at home first? But, probably not as a big poster you put up on the wall! – Mike Brown 
A 5-Level Collaboration Strategy Approach

Published on January 17, 2018 by Mike Brown in Brainzooming - All Posts, Collaboration, Implementation, Performance, Strategic Thinking, Tools


We’ve written about the importance of signaling collaboration strategy preferences when you and team members are working remotely. Even with video conferencing, you lose many of the verbal and physical cues available when you are sitting across a table planning who is going to do what and when on a project.

Talking with someone who is struggling with identifying the best ways to signal the appropriate collaboration strategy approash, we hit on a variation on the Sergio Zyman decision levels. We talk about Zyman’s decision delegation approach frequently to help leaders and teams figure work better.

Rather than addressing who will provide input and who will make decisions (as the Zyman model does), this collaboration strategy revolves around who will start developing ideas and how the collaboration will unfold within the team.
 Via Shutterstock

Here are five possibilities:

This collaboration strategy idea is still in the Brainzooming R&D lab. The situations and acronyms for this collaboration strategy approach may change.

Do you have thoughts, reactions, or alternatives? Please share them on our Facebook page. If we have big insights from trying it ourselves, we’ll pass those along, too. – Mike Brown Photo by Dmitry Sovyak on Unsplash

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2 New Strategic Planning Icebreaker Activities

Published on September 5, 2017 by Mike Brown in Brainzooming - All Posts, Collaboration, Innovation, Strategic Planning, Strategic Thinking, Strategy, Tools


Based on executives visiting the Brainzooming website, there is considerable interest right now in “strategic planning icebreaker activities.”  I guess that isn’t surprising. This is the time of year when most organizations that are going to do strategic planning are thinking about it or have already started.


Here are two brand new ideas for strategic planning icebreaker activities. They both materialized last week. One is from a misunderstood comment at a strategic planning workshop. The other is a spin on a strategic planning technique someone told me about.

#1. Why can’t we have nice things?

Walking up to a small group at a Brainzooming strategic planning workshop, I mistakenly thought one participant said, “This is why we can’t have nice things.” That was enough of an inspiration to jot the idea down on this sticky note. It occurred to me that this could be one of those fun strategic planning icebreaker activities to start a conversation about challenges and roadblocks an organization is facing. As it’s shown here, people can introduce themselves, then state a reason the organization can’t have nice innovations. Nothing about the question suggests whether the responses must be serious or silly. You may want to arrange for an early participant to share a silly answer to keep the tone light.

#2. Fill in the Blank

The second icebreaker activity idea came from someone telling me about a strategic planning workshop exercise where they used fill-in-the-blank questions. That made me remember the Match Game television program. On the game show, contestants completed a sentence by filling in a blank. The players scored points based on whether celebrities matched their answers to the typically suggestive questions.

Why not use a similar approach for strategic planning icebreaker activities?

Based on the same theme of getting a conversation started about innovation challenges, possible questions are:

I’m thinking we’d print the questions on sheets of orange paper, allowing people to answer them in writing and then hold them up as they introduce themselves.

Remember: These Are from the Brainzooming R&D Lab

We haven’t tried either of these in a real workshop yet, but we will soon. If you beat us to it, contact us about how they go! – Mike Brown
 
Creative Thinking Skills – 8 New Questions for Breakthrough Ideas

Published on March 22, 2017 by Mike Brown in Brainzooming - All Posts, Creativity, Innovation, Tools


Short story: If you want big ideas, ask the big questions, which is what extreme creativity is all about!

By Friday night, we’ll know the Elite Eight in NCAA college basketball. These eight teams that will vie Saturday and Sunday to play in the national championship basketball game the following week.

Keeping with the eight theme, here are eight new questions from the Brainzooming R&D Lab to boost your creative thinking skills. There are two extreme creativity questions to stimulate breakthrough ideas from four perspectives: Aspiration, Authority, Disruption, and doing More.





Creative Thinking Skills and Breakthrough Ideas

To develop these questions, we revisited our original source for Brainzooming extreme creativity questions: Peter’s Laws. I saw these principles, subtitled the Creed of the Sociopathic Obsessive Compulsive, in a New Orleans poster shop.

I bought the poster because the rules closely match how the creative geniuses I’ve experienced approach business. For people struggling with working around these individuals, I thought the list would help them better understand their strategies.

After launching The Brainzooming Group, I revisited Peter’s Laws, turning them into questions to inspire extreme creativity. This exercise produced my biggest personal insight about creative thinking skills: When you need huge thinking, don’t ask for big ideas; instead, use big questions to cultivate extreme creativity and breakthrough ideas.

The strategy works tremendously well. That is why I share our original list of extreme creativity questions in nearly every Brainzooming strategic and creative thinking workshop. In a recent workshop, one attendee stated he didn’t have the creative thinking skills to produce wild ideas. He wondered how he could get them. I smiled and said, “Man, do I have a technique and the questions for you!” – Mike Brown

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Strategic Planning Process – 2 Fun Ways to Frame Important Questions

Published on March 16, 2017 by Mike Brown in Brainzooming - All Posts, Creativity, Strategic Planning, Tools


Short Story: You can take serious questions and wrap them in child-like situations to add fun and new thinking to a strategic planning process.

One way to create greater engagement during a strategic planning process is through framing important questions in new ways. Sometimes that means asking familiar questions completely differently. Other times it means changing the perspective from which participants are answering questions.

Then there are times in a strategic planning process when the questions are mainly serious, but the premise is mostly silly.

Here is one of those times.

Based on someone reaching our website looking for reflections to kick off a strategic planning process, I started imagining adapting and wrapping strategic thinking questions in nursery rhymes. Except now, I can’t remember WHY I was thinking about using nursery rhymes. They must have seemed like a way to add fun.

Never wanting to waste an idea emerging from the Brainzooming R&D lab, here are two surprising (and fun) ways to frame important questions as nursery rhymes.

Goldilocks and the Three Competitors If you have strategic planning process participants who are knowledgeable about your competitors, you may want to collaboratively tap their insights. How about framing the exercise as Goldilocks and the Three Competitors? Ask them to address:

Ask the group to identify not only the three competitors, but reasons for their situation, and the best offensive and/or defensive moves your brand can take against each of them.

Jack and his Extreme Creativity Beans Suppose you need extreme creative thinking. The kind of extreme creativity that comes from people with their heads in the clouds! Take the story of Jack and the Beanstalk and imagine the magic beans are extreme creativity questions. Use questions such as those below to grow ideas that will reach into the blue sky!

As you use these questions, look for ways to turn the blue-sky ideas they generate into reality.

See what we mean?

These are a mix of serious and silly. But then again, that mix keeps business interesting! – Mike Brown