The Brainzooming Group

If you follow us on Twitter or Facebook, you may have seen a status update the other evening about launching an intense period of learning for Brainzooming as we undergo a process change the next few weeks. We’ve been in the midst of introducing a new online collaboration tool over the past several months. In the next few weeks, we’re incorporating this online collaboration tool into multiple strategic thinking sessions with varied objectives, formats, and group sizes.

In the midst of designing and facilitating these new types of strategic thinking sessions, there have already been ample opportunities to have session participants play new roles within the Brainzooming methodology. Whenever that type of process change happens, we benefit and learn many lessons as new individuals carry out what we’ve designed.

I imagine it must be similar to a playwright seeing his or her written work interpreted and brought to life by actors. There are bound to be nuances and lessons in these performances  the playwright didn’t envision.

12 Process Change Lessons

Thinking back over the first half of this week’s strategic thinking sessions, here are twelve lessons from loosening or completely turning over the reins to others in bringing the Brainzooming process to life.

So far, I have . . .

1. Become reacquainted with little things we do without thinking that make a significant difference in helping people perform more productively.
2. Realized anew how we create a visual and photogenic depiction of an organization’s strategy.
3. Seen how others approach resolving open questions and issues in alternative ways that make sense to them.
4. Taken process suggestions from others causing me to use skills I don’t use that often now because they aren’t as fun.
5. Been forced to stick with a strategic thinking exercise I didn’t think was working (but ultimately worked very well) because a client wouldn’t let me skip to another one.
6. Gotten to see what others expect they will need or will have happen during a successful strategic thinking session.
7. Needed to marry our new technology with other client technology to integrate remote participants in a strategic thinking session.
8. Used our new online collaboration tool in ways I hadn’t anticipated in order to be more personally productive.
9. Cut down the development time for what we do by weeks because of a client’s limited availability.
10. Tried to figure out fewer things ahead of time to give our strategic thinking process more capacity to adapt to a client’s current needs.
11. Screwed something up without freaking out which allowed someone else to help troubleshoot the problem and fix it with little notice.
12. Accepted “better done than perfect” more readily than I prefer.

These dozen benefits didn’t take much time to list. But being able to identify them depended on being willing to exercise less control, embracing experimentation, and being open to mistakes.

Step Back, Experiment, and Learn with Your Own Process Change

When was the last time you stepped back from a process you know inside and out to experiment, learn, and see how it plays out under the influence of others?

My advice is, if you haven’t pushed for this type of process change recently, figure out a way to make it happen right away and starting learning new lessons! – Mike Brown

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The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

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When the Brainzooming blog started, its focus was to be on strategy, creativity, and innovation. In fact, the first five Brainzooming posts in 2007 framed our views on strategic thinking and its importance as widely distributed function within organizations. A number of years later, the compilation of those five posts (our “Strategic Thinking Manifesto”) still receives strong readership and social media sharing.

Since these first posts, there have been well over six hundred posts on Brainzooming categorized under “Strategic Thinking.” Given all that strategic thinking content, it’s a good time to update our framework. In conjunction with updating our “Creating a Strategic Perspective” workshop, we’re sharing both the structure and links to a subset of the relevant Brainzooming content underpinning the workshop today.

Strategic Thinking as an Ongoing Approach

The “Cultivating a Strategic Perspective” workshop is organized in two sections:

• 4 Characteristics of Solid Strategic Thinking
• Applying Strategic Thinking Daily – Tools and Techniques to Foster Successful Strategic Thinking & Implementation

4 Characteristics of Solid Strategic Thinking

1. Strategic Thinkers Seek Perspectives from Multiple Sources

• Three Important Perspectives – Strategic Thinking Success – 3 Critical Thinking Perspectives
• Strategy Can Be Simple - A Simple Strategy Check
• Benefits of a Whole Brain Perspective – Right Brain, Left Brain, Whole Brain?
• Involving a Team of Great Thinkers – Strategy Challenges? Share Them with a Great Strategy Team

2. Strategic Thinking Goes Beyond Today’s Reality

• Finding Multiple Paths to Innovation – Innovation – Can Successful Innovation Only Happen in a Certain Way?
• Suspending Conventional Wisdom to Imagine New Ideas – Unwrap New Insights!
• Brainstorming to Deal with an Uncertain Future – A Career-Changing Business Quote – 10 Years Later
• Altering Your Familiar Perspective – A Poor Question for Valentine’s Day: “Can You Change Your Look?”
• Imagining Possibilities – Saturday Special – More Benjamin Zander from TED

3. Strategic Thinkers Question Both the Familiar and the New

• Cultivating a Strategic Perspective through Questions – BrainzoomingTM – First Questions and Strategic Thinking Questions to Identify What Matters for a Brand
• Developing Strong Strategic Questions – Great Strategic Questions – A 3-Step Strategic Question Formula  
• Protecting New Thinking – How Creative Thinking Gets Killed by Team Members – 8 Fatal Blows

4. Strategic Thinkers Display Both Patience and Impatience

• Balancing Patience and Action – Patience – Strategic Advantage or Disadvantage?
• What It Takes to Make Strategic Patience Work – The Waiting Game Strategy and “Wait” by Frank Partnoy – Making It Work
• How Brainstorming Can Provide Value for Your Organization – The Value of Brainstorming Techniques for Business Ideas
• Time Doesn’t Determine What Is Strategic – If Not Time, Then What Else Matters?
• Playing a Subtle Strategic Leadership Role – Tactically Influencing Strategic Situations
• Determining What Type of Change Strategy Is Right – Creating Change and Change Management – 4 Strategy Options

Applying Strategic Thinking Daily

Using Rich Strategic Questions

• Collections of Strategic Planning Questions – 20 Innovative Strategic Planning Questions to Prepare for Next Year and 15 Innovative Strategic Planning Questions to Get Ready for Next Year
• Questions to Prompt Extreme Creativity – 9 Extreme Creativity Questions from Peter’s Laws
• Questions to Prompt Innovation and Disruption – 11 Strategic Questions for Disruptive Innovation in Markets

Anticipating Future Issues

• Anticipating the Future in Your Industry – A Strategy for Predicting the Future More Accurately
• Imagining Unexpected Events  - Strategic Thinking Exercise – Black Swan Events in Your Plan

Finding Ideas with Intriguing Connections

• Looking for Analogous Situations – New, Innovative Ideas – Strategy Planning with What’s It Like
• Reaching for Tough to Find Comparisons – Creative Thinking Skills – Comparing Apples and Oranges 7 Ways
• How Would Someone Else Do It? –  Need New Creative Ideas? Change Your Character

Generating Many Ideas Quickly

• Transforming the Current Situation for Many Ideas – 1 Great Way to Be More Creative Each Day

Innovating Amid Constraints

• Limiting the Possibility of Performance Issues – Constraining the Possibility of Poor Results
• Limiting Your Resources and Still Succeeding – The Simplicity of Next to Nothing
• Developing New Ideas when Constrained by Too Many Similar Alternatives – 24 Ideas for Dilbert (and You) When a Great New Idea Is Lacking
• Limiting the Need for Too Much Performance – Convergent Thinking Week – A BDTP Perspective

New Thinking with Old Ideas

• Helping Your Organization Be More Innovative – New Business Ideas and a Creative Block in Your Organization
• Exploiting Ideas Leftover Ideas – Creating from Creative Residue – Brainstorming for Later Use
• Making Old Ideas Extraordinary – A Friday Shrimp Special
• Reusing and Recycling Ideas –  New Year’s Resolutions – Be More Derivative, Creative, Fun and  Strategy in Action – Suzy and Jack Welch & Fast Company Links
• Changing Familiar Ideas in New Ways – Diet Coke Can Redesign – Branding and Creativity Lessons
• Being Better at Borrowing Ideas – Reinterpreting Creative Inspiration – 7 Lessons to Borrow Creative Ideas

Addressing Unknowns

• Dealing with Knowledge Gaps – Strategic Thinking Tip – Keep Going!
• When Rapid Timelines Create More Unknowns – Twenty-One Project Management Implications of Wanting Things FAST
• Forcing Faster Decisions when Information Is Missing – Making a Decision – 7 Situations Begging for Quick Decisions  

Efficiency and Results

• Targeting Your Best Successes – Ted Williams and Focusing on Your “Happy Zone”
• Prioritizing by Value with Stoplight – Reinvent Yourself Week – Look and Ask Around
• Where Brainstorming Provides Value – Innovation and the Value of Brainstorming
• Knowing When to Stop Brainstorming – Brainstorming Ideas – 10 Signs You’re Done Brainstorming

Envisioning Possibilities

• Simple Ideas for Visual Thinking – Visual Thinking Skills – Getting Them in Shape with Letters and Shapes
• Using Graphs More Effectively – Graphs for Visual Thinking – Problem Solving with 2 Lines
• Using a Matrix More Effectively – Visual Thinking Tools – A Matrix Is a Hard Working Tool
• Visual Thinking Overview Presentation – by Liz Burrow, Burlix Studio http://ow.ly/i9vVj (Slideshare)
• The Marketer’s Visual Tool Kit by Terry Richey  (Affiliate Link)
• The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam  (Affiliate Link)

Telling a Strategic Story

• The One-Page Recommendation Format – Improve the Success of Your Letters to Santa – Guaranteed!
• Making Strategic Messages: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Story-filled – Made to Stick – Chip and Dan Heath (Affiliate Link)

Working Across and Up an Organization

• How an Idea Evangelist Works – Innovation Strategy with a New Audience  
• Things to Listen for in a Potentially Adversarial Conversation – Find Agreement in an Adversarial Conversation – 10 Things to Listen For
• 5-Level Decision Making –Level 5 Decisions – Decision Making without Your Influence
• Sharing Interim Thinking – Dirty Ideas? Let Others Clean Up Your Creative Thinking
• Seek Out Emerging Experts – You Find Experts Everywhere You Look
• Making New Team Members Successful – New Employee Success – 5 Ways to Create Success for New Ideas
• The “Dinner Table” Analogy for Team Interaction – Project Management – Dinner Table Analogy for Project Team Members

Managing Challenging People

• Diagnosing the Difficult Personalities around You – The Periodic Table of Corporate Behavior
• Five Ways to Keep the Boss from Dominating Strategy Planning – The Process of Strategy Planning: 5 Ways to Keep the Boss from Dominating
• When Someone Doesn’t Want Your Help – Assistance Unwanted – 5 Management Style Signs Helping Is Futile
• Taking Advantage of Critical Thinkers – Creative Thinking Skills – 5 People Vital to Critical Thinking, Literally
• Sharing the Credit for New Ideas and Success – Creative Quickie – Share the Credit!

Would Your Organization Benefit from Stronger Strategic Thinking?

If your organization would benefit from stronger strategic thinking, we’d love to share our expertise and tools through workshop training. Delivered in-person or online, all at once or spread over multiple sessions, The Brainzooming Group approach can help your people improve their skills in identifying new, strategic opportunities and turning them into market realities. Call (816-509-5320)or email us (info@brainzooming.com) to get started! - Mike Brown

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For as often as you hear business people mention “focus groups,” it’s clear this qualitative research technique is sometimes used where it should be and used a LOT where it shouldn’t be.

I guess nobody ever said market research was clear cut!

We don’t cover market research much since it’s a more specialized area many of you don’t have in your responsibilities. Even if you’re not managing focus groups or other qualitative research approaches, however, you may be asked to provide input into their use or design.

The importance of having a framework to understand when and how focus groups fit into your decision making process this was underscored while sitting through focus groups arranged by a consultant for one of our clients.These groups were designed and managed in very different and odd ways that weren’t appropriate for the client’s decision making process.

5 Ways to Not Screw Up Focus Group Input

If a focus group is suggested as part of your decision making process, here are five questions to make sure they will contribute valuable input:

1. Are you trying to expand your divergent thinking about whatever you’re testing?

Focus groups (or really any qualitative research) aren’t for decision making by themselves. That’s where projectable, quantitative research fits in your market research agenda. Go into focus groups expecting to have your perspectives expanded since they work better for divergent thinking more than convergent thinking. A focus group shouldn’t be used as a standalone market research technique for gaining the input to make a definitive decision.

2. Are you willing to incorporate varied types of market research input into your decision making?

Traditional focus groups tend to be very verbal experiences for participants. Non-talking participants’ perspectives will be missed unless you have a GREAT facilitator to force these people into the conversation. This is why you see more non-verbal elements in qualitative research now, including written exercises, collage creation, homework projects, show and tell with items from daily life, designing experiences, etc. If you’re uneasy about inputs extending beyond what focus group participants say about your market research topic, think carefully about conducting focus groups to expand your insights.

3. Are you talking to enough different types of people to provide a flavor of the market segments of greatest interest?

If you’re deciding on focus groups, conduct multiple ones to provide the diverse perspectives needed for rich divergent thinking. What you hear in talking to ten people in a focus group facility isn’t representative of a market. It simply tells you what those ten people think. If you’re after expanded perspectives, make sure you conduct enough focus groups. Enhancing your divergent thinking depends on doing more than one focus group per market segment. It takes multiple focus groups to experience a diverse range of perspectives and gain a sense of whether themes are emerging.

4. Are you ready to witness a lot of sameness in the pursuit of stronger divergent thinking?

One focus group is interesting. Six or eight focus groups can be deadly.  While pursuing diverse insights, however, you can expect a lot of sameness: the same facilitator with the same number of participants, similar parts of the day for the focus groups, similar discussion structures, etc. Some facilitators even wear the same clothes for every session because different outfits create different focus group participant reactions. This all intended to not introduce any non-related cues that might influence responses. When you’re in the backroom observing the focus groups, your boredom with the process shouldn’t lead to demands for dramatic format changes to keep you interested across the entire market research effort. When you want diverse perspectives, format sameness is part of the deal.

5. Are YOU expecting to make the decisions when the focus groups are completed?

While focus group participants may be decision makers in your marketplace, they aren’t decision makers in your organization for whatever you are researching. It’s YOUR decision to select a strategic course of action. Focus groups are just one element – one input – into your decision making. You may need to decide to do exactly the opposite of what focus group participants suggested. That’s okay, because decision making is your job. You have the full view of the strategic situation. Don’t expect to hand your decision making responsibilities over to focus group participants and think you can absolve yourself of having to make a solid strategic decision.

Is a focus group the right market research technique for your decision making?

If it’s not obvious by now, you should have answered “Yes” to each question if focus groups are being recommended to support your decision making process. Any inability to answer these questions affirmatively suggests you need more discussion or different expectations for focus groups to make sense for you . . . no matter how much you love the M&Ms you get in the back room at the focus group facility! - Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming email updates.

The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

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It’s fantastic to welcome back B2B marketing expert Randall Rozin for another guest article, this one on how to unleash creative thinking. Randall’s six ways to unleash more creativity provide another valuable perspective that creativity is n’t frivolous in business but is essential. Here’s Randall!

Six Surefire Ways to Unleash More Creativity in Your Business by Randall Rozin

I know many people in business settings who view themselves as ‘creatively challenged’.  They simply think that they are not creative.   Untrue.  We all have the capacity for vast levels of creative thinking.  While certain disciplines (i.e., advertising, the arts, and industrial design) tend to draw more “creative” types, I believe creativity exists within all parts of a business.  The trick is to help people unlock their creative potential to solve problems, to create new problems for competitors, to make the workplace more engaging, and to contribute to the bottom line.

Here are six surefire ways I have found to help unleash more creativity in an organization.

1.      Set Expectations

With expectation setting you are giving your people the permission they need to overcome the ‘self-editing’ behaviors that limit their ideas. Expect creativity and creative thinking in your people.  Recognize it, nurture it, and reinforce it.

2.       Use Comfort or Shock

Imagine a continuum ranging from “Comfort to Shock.”  Creating the right conditions along any point of this continuum can help frame the need for expansive thinking in your people.  Some examples:

• Shocks can come from inside and/or  outside the organization
• Highlight burning platforms:  the economy, disasters, self induced conditions
• Reduce resources to force new thinking
• Create short, immovable timelines – pressure turns coal into diamonds
• Change the scene by going offsite to a more comfortable, relaxed location

 3.       Practice divergent and convergent thinking

Divergent thinking allows you to generate as many ideas as possible from the simple to the complex and relevant to non relevant.  Convergent thinking allows you to combine your ideas into a more logical form. The outcome is an idea set that can merge to form a creative insight to inform a strategy, business model, or other innovation.

 4.      Combine ideas into a new form

Often innovations come from two dissimilar ideas combined together to form something completely unique.  Look around and you’ll see ideas abound outside your department, your company, your industry, even your culture that when applied to your unique problem can provide an insight that has escaped so many others before you.

5.       Slow down before you speed up

It is tempting to jump right into the solution space.  Slowing down up front allows for observation, for sensory input, for looking beyond the obvious to allow deeper processing.  Then creativity can explode.

6.      Practice ‘Future Hindsight’

I call this method ‘future hindsight’ because, as humans, we can leverage a unique skill to think in a future tense.  Use this technique to project yourself into a future timeframe and look back at your present situation.  When you do this you’ll see obstacles are not so large or so permanent. You can examine your current state with a different lens.  Then you can begin to imagine what you need to happen in the future then set a path to get there more clearly.

Creativity with a Profit is Business

Remember that creativity for its own sake is art and creativity with a profit motive is business. Business tries to rationalize and make things more efficient.  While creativity is not always the most efficient process, it can be transformative.  So you have to embrace some level of inefficiency to get the maximum benefit from creative thinking and the creative process. – Randall Rozin

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Download the free ebook, “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” to help you generate fantastic creative thinking and ideas! For an organizational innovation success boost, contact The Brainzooming Group to help your team be more successful by rapidly expanding strategic options and creating innovative plans to efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can deliver these benefits for you.

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While the Brainzooming blog (which has its fifth birthday on November 10, 2012) wasn’t originally intended to be about project management techniques, it’s become a much more significant topic area the past several years.

The increased prominence for project management techniques on the Brainzooming blog has come about as we’ve experienced and helped more clients work through implementation challenges. Having a strong, innovative plan is only part of the Brainzooming equation. Implementing innovation for organizations reluctant to embrace changes needed to survive and grow requires another set of skills for people playing project manager and project team member roles.

Here are twenty-one articles organizing the project management technique strategies we’ve been sharing with clients to create needed changes in their organizations.

Project Management Techniques for Starting Strongly

Project Management Techniques – 6 Project Manager Mistakes to Not Repeat

Getting a project started right is lot easier when you’re not making early mistakes. These are six mistakes I’ve made on project management techniques so you don’t have to make them.

Implementation Problems? 7 Signs You’re Understarting, Not Overthinking

Strong project management technique requires both thinking and starting. One won’t work without the other.

Twenty-One Project Management Implications of Wanting Things FAST

When the pressure is on for completing a project fast, there are related implications an organization and a project manager have to contend with successfully.

Project Team Interactions

Project Management – Dinner Table Analogy for Project Team Members

There are right and wrong ways for project team member communication to take place. There are also right and wrong times for how you communicate within your project team.

March Madness and What Outstanding Point Guards Bring to Business Teams

A strong project manager is the equivalent of a great basketball point guard on a project. An outstanding project manager is selfless, a leader, and has multi-dimensional talents to contribute to the project team.

All I Want for Christmas Is You (To Get the Stuff Done that I’m Waiting For)

There are many ways to prioritize what you do next. When you’re in the midst of a project, consider prioritizing based on what other project team members are depending on you to finish.

Change Management

Built for Discomfort – An Alternative Prioritization Strategy for Innovation

If your organization tends to select strategies and prioritize projects that are comfortable, here’s a way to more overtly push for change.

Creating Change and Change Management – 4 Strategy Options

The best approach to create change will differ based on expectations about the status quo and the demand for dramatically different results.

8 Change Management Lessons from Major Changes in the Mass Translation

Wide-scale change in a change-resistant organization provides a unique set of project management challenges and potential remedies to achieve the maximum beneficial impact.

Major Change Management – Managing Ongoing Performance Gaps

Big changes are rarely “one and done” efforts. Prepare ahead of time for the ongoing reinforcement and change management techniques a project manager and project team will need to implement.

Project Management Technique Challenges

No Implementation Success? 13 Reasons Things Getting Done Is a Problem

If your organization has a habit of failing to successfully implement new projects, here are thirteen problems to watch for and fix.

Checklists – Helping Visualize the Uncertain When Plans Fall Through

If a project isn’t going as planned, step back and make sure you have a checklist to guide your way back to normalcy and stronger performance in a hurry.

Dealing with Difficult People – 16 Articles on Help and Support for Prickly People

If you handle project management on enough projects, you’re going to wind up working with challenging people. If you can’t avoid them, at least be ready to successfully lead them (and the rest of the project team) to success.

Project Management – 7 Steps to Winning a Fuel Mileage Race Project

NASCAR teams are used to stretching one of their main resources (fuel) with creative, winning strategies. Smart project teams can learn and apply some of the principles NASCAR teams use for success with less.

Improving Decision Making

Making a Decision – 7 Situations Begging for Quick Decisions

It’s easy for certain personality types and organizations to take too long on decision making. In these seven situations, there’s no need to extend decision making time unnecessarily.

Making Decision Making Easier – She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not

One factor that can slow decision making speed is too many available choices. Here is a low-tech, very direct way to narrow your decision options and move directly toward decision making.

Level 5 Decisions – Decision Making without Your Influence

One way to speed project-related decision making is when the senior person on the project delegates appropriate levels of decision making to team members and makes the delegation clear. Here’s a solid approach to make this happen.

Project Management Techniques for Finishing Successfully

Project Management – 15 Techniques When Time Is Running Down

When time is running down on a project, project management rules don’t necessarily change, but how you apply them can. These techniques can close out a project more successfully when timing is running down.

Convergent Thinking Week – A BDTP Perspective

When time is running down on a project you have approached with higher than expected standards, consider relaxing those standards. Getting done can definitely be more important than being perfect.

Project Management Tips – 8 Signs a Creative Project Is Done

While we often consider a project done when all the steps are completed or the deadline is reached, that’s not always the case with a creative project. A creative project could be done before all the steps are completed or the deadline is reached.

Strategies for Finishing a Project

Closing out a project the right way can set the stage for future success. A strong project closeout won’t simply happen by accident though. The closeout phase needs to be project managed, too.  – Mike Brown

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Does your organization have good ideas, but lacks the project management techniques to bring them to reality? The Brainzooming Group and our collaborative, implementation-oriented project management techniques will quickly move you toward success. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call  816-509-5320  for a free consultation on how to get started.

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When it comes to brainstorming and divergent thinking time, we’re big on pushing for the impossible. During convergent thinking phases when the focus is prioritization and decision making, the focus shifts to narrowing choices, quick decisions, and determining the action steps for implementation.

Quick decisions have been on my mind lately. I tend to take time making a decision, but as you carry out more roles in an organization, the luxury of adequate time every time you’re making a decision just isn’t practical. As we’re growing and expanding The Brainzooming Group, I’m trying to be more disciplined about staying out of certain decisions and turning others into quick decisions.

Seven Situations Begging for Quick Decisions

Thinking back to client situations over the past few years, here are seven types of decision making situations across three different categories where too much time often gets spent debating and considering actions.

Non-Strategic Decisions

1. Non-strategic issues - We talk about strategic issues as those that “matter” for an organization. If a decision making outcome won’t matter that much, don’t spend that much time on it.

2. Changes to processes customers won’t experience - For as much as we talk about the need for strategic change, invest more time deciding about changes customers will notice than background processes they won’t ever experience.

3. There’s a track record from previous decision making - Especially in big corporations with lots of administrative functions, it’s possible for employees to spend way too much time on decision making about simple issues primarily important to them. If your organization has a solid history or guidelines to shape decision making, use them and invest your efforts on newer, more speculative decisions.

There Are Multiple Options that Could Suffice

4. You can recover from making a decision that’s off the mark - If your environment is one where it’s relatively easy to try things, learn, and adapt, you’re in a lot better situation to make a quick decision and launch into implementation.

5. You’re making a decision from among multiple choices customers will accept - Don’t waste too much time debating changes to product or service features low on the list of things customers care about or notice. Invest the time saved into stronger implementation.

Limited Resource Are Available

6. You’ll spend more on making a decision than the decision costs - In a meeting-happy organizational culture, you can wind up with multiple meetings to consider and debate even small questions. If you’re spending $5,000 in employee time (yes in a staff role, you still have an hourly rate) to make a $1,000 decision, STOP!

7. You’re trying to decide about things you’ll never be able to do - We definitely encourage thinking big and considering possibilities well beyond today. But when it gets down to prioritization and decision making time, it’s time to decide on things you will be able to implement and not just be able dream about for an extended period.

What would you decide to add or subtract from this list of quick decisions?

How do you handle quick decisions? Are there other decision making situations where you aggressively push for quick decisions?  - Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming blog email updates.

The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

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It’s a fantastic time to revisit and explore strategic options in front of you both personally and professionally. Here is a 10-item checklist for thinking and action to help guide your efforts.

Photo by: kallejp | Source: Photocase.com

10 Strategic Options for Thinking and Action to Explore this Week

1. You are allowed to define yourself. Make sure not to pick all your weaknesses and try to force them into your self- definition.

2.You can accomplish nearly any strategic options you enjoy. Just explore strategic options when it’s time to explore strategic options and make decisions when it’s time to decide.

3. It’s a bad strategy to stick with what you’ve done until something goes tragically wrong. “Been there, done that” is boring.

4. Possibilities are fantastic, but ultimately, they aren’t realities. You have to cultivate both of them.

5. Those who obsess on history are doomed to miss the future.

6. A practice you thought was good in a previous difficult business situation could have really been the best of many bad practices.

7. There are so many situations where when you think you’re not ready to start, it’s exactly the time you should be starting.

8. Some “good” strategic options take WAY TOO MUCH TIME to make happen.

9. The longer you put off pursuing a goal, the more it can grow to seem like an insurmountable challenge. Find the right time & force yourself to get started.

10. Every person’s path is going to be different. Compare your path to others’ paths a little, but ignore the paths others are on a lot. - Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming blog email updates.

The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

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