Nearly every week since the start of the year, the Wednesday feature has been “Change Your Character,” a great technique to generate new ideas by delegating a challenge to someone who you wouldn’t typically think about selecting to do your work. This lateral thinking approach uses someone in a completely different line of work to help you look at your own situation with a fresh perspective.

As a refresher, here are the steps:

1. State the business challenge that you’re addressing – it could be an opportunity, a problem, a new process or approach, etc.
2. Pick who you want to work on your situation. This could be a real person, a fictional or cartoon character, or even another business that faces an analogous situation.
3. Once you’ve identified who you’ll put on the job, list 8 to 10 approaches that the person, character, or business uses to address opportunities or challenges.
4. Using the 8 to 10 approaches, apply them to your situation to generate at least 3 new ideas each for solving it.

The Wednesday feature does steps 2 and 3, allowing you to focus primarily on step 4 – idea generation. As the weekly feature moves to less frequent appearances, here’s a handy summary of the 25 columns that you can bookmark for use in successfully addressing future opportunities. Within each category, the situations and characters covered are listed, along with a link to the original article.

Strategy

• Disruptive Strategy – Bart Simpson
• Competitive Strategy – Terrorist
• Competing Against Bigger Players – Wee Willie Keeler
• Getting People to Participate in Strategic Planning – Event Planner

Relationship & Brand Building

• Lead Generation – Police Detective
• Identifying Good Prospects – Baseball Scout
• Growing Business Opportunities – Farmer
• Building Business Relationships, Strengthening & Maintaining Business Relationships, and Improving Challenging Business Relationships – Self-Help Advice Columinst
• Customer Service Approach – Babysitter
• Communicating Intangible Ideas – Garrison Keillor
• Brand Repositioning – Donald Trump & Madonna
• Creating Product Extensions – Successful Product-Extending Brands

Team Building

• Creating Excitement – Cheerleader
• Training & Developing Others – Great Teachers

Management & Problem Solving

• Managing Priorities – Air Traffic Controller
• Preventing & Dealing with Problems – Firefighter
• Diagnosing & Curing Problems – Doctor
• Project Turnarounds – Turnaround CEO
• Trimming Waste – Fitness Trainer

Professional Skills

• Improvising in Unfamiliar Situations – An Improv Comedian
• Generating a Variety of Potential Solutions – Castaways from Gilligan’s Island
• Clear, Concise Writing – Reporter
• Simplifying Things – Forrest Gump

Just a note – I used Bart Simpson recently, and it worked very well. Give it a try and have great success Changing Your Character!

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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