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A Twitter friend tweeted something the other day about performing a SWOOT analysis. Thinking there may be a new type of strategic thinking exercise I need to check out, I clicked the link.

As I had already suspected, the SWOOT analysis was just a typo in the tweet. The article was really about doing a SWOT analysis: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats.

Same old SWOT stuff after all, but the Twitter typo got me thinking.

7 Ideas to Turn a SWOT Analysis into a SWOOT Analysis

If there were a SWOOT analysis, what would that other O stand for? What new O word would add new depth, clarity, or insight into the standard SWOT analysis to enhance the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats you’ve uncovered from the classic strategic thinking exercise?

Here are seven O’s to consider tucking into the middle of your next SWOT analysis (along with related strategic thinking questions) to add a new dimension:

1. Objectives – From the strengths and weaknesses already identified, what are the most important and/or challenging goals?
2. Occurrences – What events took place during the period you’re evaluating to shape future opportunities and threats?
3. Obsolescence – What things or ideas are no longer relevant now as you explore your future situation?
4. Opinions – What are the most strongly held opinions relative to the analysis, and which of them are fact-based opinions?
5. Ordinary – What things are so common that they’ve become part of the backdrop but could emerge as big positive or negative issues?
6. Objections - Amid the analysis of the current and future situation, what are the most serious objections to conclusions from the analysis?
7. Organization – Where is the organization ready or not ready to capitalize on the opportunities and threats it will face?

I’m not sure a SWOOT analysis could or even should replace a typical SWOT analysis, but when a strategic thinking exercise is used frequently and becomes so common, it’s always worthwhile to inject something different to trigger new thinking.

That’s true even when the new strategic thinking exercise is prompted by a typo in a tweet! - 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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Today, we have a second installment in our Brainzooming series on strategic thinking questions inspired by the Fast Company list of the 100 Most Creative People in Business 2013.

Today’s strategic thinking questions focus on creativity, social media, and content marketing.

As we mentioned in yesterday’s post, these strategic thinking questions don’t appear in the Fast Company most creative people in business profiles. They were created by reviewing the profiles and asking ourselves what questions those profile may have asked themselves while working on their creative achievements.

The reason we’re emphatic this is because of what happened with Fast Company after publishing our post covering the 2012 list. We noticed late one morning the main Fast Company account shared our tweet about the blog post. Noting the hundreds of thousands of followers they have, I quickly inserted a Brainzooming ad in the post, and waited for the blog traffic explosion. Then, as a double check, I went to the Fast Company RT to see what it would be like to wind up at our blog from a Fast Company link.

Guess what?

Fast Company swapped out our link to Brainzooming in my original tweet, substituting one to the list on its website. If we’d ripped off their copy, I would completely understand. But our content is unique AND featured more than 100 links to the magazine’s website. That’s a social media foul, in my book, but what are you going to do?

Here are today’s UNIQUE strategic thinking questions. You can click to get to the underlying profiles, but don’t expect to find these creativity, social media, and content marketing questions there!

Creativity, Content Marketing, and Social Media Questions Inspired by the Fast Company 100 Most Creative People in Business 2013

Creativity Questions

How many scary and risky things do you say “Yes” to in the course of a year? How many do you say “No” to? What’s the impact of your answers on your creative output? (13. Connie Britton - ACTRESS, NASHVILLE)

What are new ways to expand your global influences without having to leave your office? (2. Dong-Hoon Chang - EVP, HEAD OF DESIGN STRATEGY, SAMSUNG)

What’s the longest your organization has ever brainstormed, and are you ready to brainstorm 10x longer at one stretch? (27. Maria Mujica - LATIN AMERICAN MARKETING DIRECTOR, GUMS AND CANDY, MONDELĒZ INTERNATIONAL)

How can you deliberately create more white space to experiment, try stuff, learn, change, and do it better? (32.Hosain Rahman - FOUNDER, CEO, JAWBONE)

Why would it be interesting to hear you vent about what’s gone wrong or has failed in your life? (34. Marc Maron - COMEDIAN, WTF WITH MARC MARON)

If you were required to triple the number of new creative ideas you generate on any given day, what would you do differently to boost your creative output? (37. Darrin Crescenzi - SENIOR DESIGNER, PROPHET)

What creative residue do you leave yourself at the end of the day to fuel a quick creative start tomorrow? (47. Simon Rich – WRITER)

How can you grow the number of self-described “creatives” you talk to weekly to boost your new ideas? (6. Max Levchin - CEO, AFFIRM; BOARD MEMBER, YAHOO)

How would it change your creative perspective if, as a TV show’s creator is called a “showrunner,” your title were whatever you produce + “runner”? (77-83. TV’S Head of the Class – A GROUP OF SIX TV SHOW CREATORS)

If you typically have a plan in place for your creativity, how would just starting and seeing what happens feel more refreshing and creative? (77-83. TV’S Head of the Class – A GROUP OF SIX TV SHOW CREATORS)

How can you bring together young, experienced people and older, inexperienced people to reverse the typical learning environment of the older teaching the young? (84. Michelle Rowley - FOUNDER, CODE SCOUTS)

What happens when you flip your typical creative process around completely? (90. Pendleton Ward – ANIMATOR)

What’s stopping you from asking for favors and help from people you have no business trying to talk to? (96. Ruzwana Bashir - COFOUNDER, CEO, PEEK)

Lots of risk can thwart addressing lots of societal need, unless someone is bold enough to do something – how bold are you? (98. Wendell Pierce - COFOUNDER, STERLING FARMS FRESH FOODS)

Content Marketing and Social Media Questions

How can you collect and share more real-life stories of people your company has helped in meaningful, personal ways? (10. Scott Harrison - FOUNDER, CHARITY: WATER)

What would happen if you tried to come up with and select a year’s worth of content marketing ideas before you published your first piece of content? (18. Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele - COCREATORS AND STARS, KEY & PEELE)

If you covered only one topic, how would the narrow topic free you for incredible diversity in how you deliver content on the topic? (20. Lara Setrakian- FOUNDER, SYRIA DEEPLY)

What are all the ways you are and aren’t making it easy for your fans to create and share content about their experiences with your brand? (40. Kate Phelan and Justin Cooke - CREATIVE DIRECTOR, TOPSHOP; CMO, TOPSHOP)

How are you getting ready to have your brand catch and do something with the content your audience throws back at you? (21. Jaime Robinson - VP, EXECUTIVE CREATIVE DIRECTOR, PEREIRA & O’DELL)

If you’re giving new content away, what and when will you get paid for it? (28. Diplo - DJ, FOUNDER, MAD DECENT)

What are new ways to serve up your best content and not just your most recent content to readers? (45. Kate Lee - DIRECTOR OF CONTENT, MEDIUM)

What will it take for your brand to process external inputs and do / say something about them in real-time via social media? (7. Jill Applebaum and Megan Sheehan - CREATIVE DIRECTOR, JWT; ART DIRECTOR AND DESIGNER)

Would a prank via social media potentially help draw attention to a cause you care about deeply? (76. Rebecca Nagle and Hannah Brancato - FEMINIST ACTIVISTS)

When it comes to content, what more could you do with your content to create attention for your brand or another brand that needs attention? (88. Sscott Borchetta - CEO, BIG MACHINE RECORDS)

How can you create a place for smart, opinionated, and even snarky customers to hang out and share their knowledge about what they love (which might not be your brand)? (91. Mahbod Moghadam - COFOUNDER, RAP GENIUS)

What will it take to create as clear a group of dissenters for your content as you have created fans? (92. Leandra Medine - FOUNDER, MANREPELLER.COM)

If you provided 3 weeks of training to the content creators in your organization, how would you best use the time? (97. Stephanie Horbaczewski - PRESIDENT, CEO, STYLEHAUL) 

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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The June Fast Company features its list of The 100 Most Creative People in Business 2013. Last year, we used the issue as a point of departure to share ideas, tips, and thought starters inspired by each of the creative people on the list. Last year’s series of Brainzooming posts based on the 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012 has received great attention all year long, and for this year, we’re taking a bit of a twist.

Given interest in the recent Brainzooming post highlighting more than 200 strategic planning questions, we used the stories from the most creative people in business list to generate strategic thinking questions inspired by the varied creative successes represented in the issue.

As with last year’s Brainzooming recap, these questions AREN’T in the Fast Company issue. Instead, we applied our technique of taking a case study and imagining the questions that would inspire someone else to get to the same place as the person or business in the case study.

So to repeat: this is ALL NEW CONTENT you’ll be reading throughout our series of posts. Later in the week, I’ll explain WHY I’m being so emphatic about this being content you won’t see in Fast Company. Stay tuned for that!

Branding and Customer Experience Questions Inspired by the Fast Company 100 Most Creative People in Business 2013

Today’s list includes twenty-five strategic thinking questions on branding and customer experience. Later in the week, we’ll feature questions on creativity, content marketing, insights, and strategy.

Branding Questions

How can you change your brand experience to cause people to want to spend more time with the brand? (12. Liz Muller - DIRECTOR OF CONCEPT DESIGN, STARBUCKS)

How would an artist create a live art event starring your brand? (16. Ai Weiwei – ARTIST)

What could you do to grow a large enough audience and facilitate a way for them to want to talk about your brand more and longer? (19. Fred Graver - HEAD OF TV TEAM, TWITTER)

If “cute” is part of your brand personality, how can you make your brand experience more childlike to enhance its “cuteness”? (22. Phill Ryu and David Lanham - FOUNDERS, IMPENDING)

What do your customers love about your brand, and how do you respect what they love when you freshen your brand experience? (25. Jason Wilson - LEAD PRODUCT DESIGNER, PINTEREST)

What are the hidden aspects of your brand experience that hold new, untold, and intriguing stories? (63. Roman Mars - HOST, 99% INVISIBLE)

How can you start serving the cool part of a market that isn’t being served sufficiently? (68. Rosie O’Neill and Josh Resnick - COFOUNDERS, SUGARFINA)

Customer Experience Questions

If your product were completely interactive with a user’s touch, why would it be exciting for them to touch the product? (15. Ivan Poupyrev - SENIOR RESEARCH SCIENTIST, DISNEY RESEARCH)

What are you doing to add more personalization (that provides value) into your customer experience? (17. Michelle Peluso - CEO, GILT GROUPE)

How would fewer choices make things easier and better for your customers? (67. Aerin Lauder - FOUNDER, CREATIVE DIRECTOR, AERIN)

How can you offer customers a smaller set of options, but give them more flexibility and higher performance as a trade-off? (30. Bob Mathews and Gary Chow - SENIOR RADIO FREQUENCY ENGINEERS, AT&T)

If you redesigned your business – even if it’s a stodgy business – around delivering “more fun for customers,” what would have to change about your customer experience? (35. Alli Webb - FOUNDER, DRYBAR)

How would your brand’s customer experience change if you designed it for the lowest common denominator technology instead of the newest technology? (4. Kirthiga Reddy - DIRECTOR OF ONLINE OPERATIONS, FACEBOOK INDIA)

What can you do to translate what you know about your customers into pleasant surprises for them? (46. Jackie Wilgar - EVP OF MARKETING, LIVE NATION)

What are new ways you can turn customer research efforts into customer design opportunities? (48. Tina Wells - FOUNDER, CEO, BUZZ MARKETING GROUP)

In what ways could you create opportunities for your customers to meet, talk, and bond? (56. Sarah Simmons – CHEF, CITY GRIT)

How can you make the online and offline experiences of your brand have the same feel? (64. Tare Lemmey - CEO, NET POWER & LIGHT)

If your customers don’t have a 100% success rate with your product or service, how can you make it more like something they can do/use with complete success? (66. Michael Buckwald and David Holz - COFOUNDERS, LEAP MOTION)

What can you do to feed information to customers about what other customers are thinking / choosing / doing right now? (70. Kevin Bruner - PRESIDENT, CTO, TELLTALE GAMES)

In what ways can you bring together people who wouldn’t otherwise meet but would find value in doing so? (71. Caroline Ghosn - FOUNDER, CEO, LEVO LEAGUE)

How could you turn a complicated process in your customer experience into a one-step process? (73. Katelyn Gleason - COFOUNDER, CEO, ELIGIBLE)

If your product requires training to use, what do you need to change about it so you can eliminate all training? (74. Aneel Bhusri - COFOUNDER, CO–CEO, WORKDAY)

What is pre-planned in your customer experience that would benefit from being spontaneous, and how can you make that happen? (75. Andy Cohen - TV HOST, EVP OF TALENT AND DEVELOPMENT, BRAVO)

How can you make it easier for potential customers to go from receiving a reminder about your brand to taking action (with telepathic communication as the end goal)? (85. Grace Woo - FOUNDER, PIXELS.IO)

If combining live events, social, and crowdsourcing is where it’s at, how do you use social to let the crowd, whether in-person or remotely, influence your event? (87. Bozoma Saint John - DIRECTOR OF CULTURAL BRANDING, MUSIC, AND ENTERTAINMENT, PEPSICO)

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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Productive strategic thinking exercises are at the heart of The Brainzooming Group methodology. Great brainstorming and strategic planning questions encourage and allow people to talk about what they know including factual information, personal perspectives, and their views of the future.

The Value of Strategic Thinking Exercises

I tell people who ask about how we developed The Brainzooming Group methodology that a big motivator was business people I worked with who didn’t know how to fill out strategic planning templates and worksheets.

They did, however, know a lot about the businesses, customers, and markets they served. We found we could ask them strategic planning questions and brainstorming questions to capture information to create strategic plans.

Since I could write the plan, knowing strategic planning questions to ask (within a fun, stimulating environment to answer them) was key to developing creative, quickly-prepared plans infused with strategic thinking.

And when you combine “creative,” “strategic thinking,” and “quickly-prepared,” you get Brainzooming!

Here is a sampling of more than 200 brainstorming questions and strategic planning questions that are part of the strategic thinking exercises we use with The Brainzooming Group. Yes, more than two hundred questions! Who could ask for more?

More than 200 Strategic Planning Questions for Strong Strategic Thinking

Creating Productive Questions

• Great Strategic Questions – A 3-Step Strategic Question Formula – 3 questions to make sure your questions elicit the best answers.

Strategic Thinking Questions for Developing Overall Strategy

• First Questions – 1 question that’s the granddaddy of all strategy questions within the Brainzooming methodology.
• Strategic Thinking Questions to Identify What Matters for a Brand – 10 questions for getting to the heart of what’s strategic for your brand.
• Identifying What Matters in Your Organization? – 7 questions to signal whether a topic or effort is strategic for a brand.
• Checking for Simplicity in Your Strategy – 3 questions to see if your strategy is simple enough to drive changes in strategic and tactical actions within your organization.
• Anticipating Non-Traditional Competitors – 4 questions for anticipating non-traditional competitors and strategic threats your organization may face that aren’t apparent currently.
• Do You Have What It Takes for a Marketing Plan? – 15 questions to ensure you have everything in place for a complete marketing plan.

Developing a Strategic Vision

• Strategic Planning Doesn’t Have to Kill Creativity – 5 questions to better identify and articulate your organizational vision statement.
• What Are We Trying to Say? – 7 questions to improve the understandability, emotion, and impact of your organizational vision statements.
• Look and Ask Around – 3 questions to assess where you or your organization provide the most and least value, along with where you should focus more effort to improve the value you deliver.
• Look Inside for Distinctive Talents – 5 questions to identify talents and capabilities that can set both organizations and individuals apart from the crowd.

Digital and Social Media Exploration

• Social Media Content Personality Audit – Is Your Brand Personality There? – 10 questions to gauge whether your social media content conveys your brand personality.
• See Me, Feel Me, Criticize Me – 8 questions to ask relative to the accuracy, ease, and user experience of your digital presence.

Creative Naming Questions

• Creating Cool Product Names for a New Product Idea – 8 Creative Thinking Questions – 8 questions to go beyond the typical bland names for new products that stand out from the crowd.
• Creative Job Titles – 8 Innovative Questions to Create Them – 8 questions to enliven the job titles you use throughout your organization – or to come up with your own new self-created title.

Innovation-Oriented Questions

• 11 Strategic Questions for Disruptive Innovation in Markets – 11 questions to help identify different types of innovation opportunities.
• A Spoonful of Unconventional Makes the Conventionalism Go Down – 4 questions to look for an unexpected innovation opportunity in your market.
• Innovation Opportunity – Knowing When New and Innovative Becomes Status Quo – 3 questions to figure out when it is time to innovate your previous innovation.
• 1 Great Way to Be More Creative Each Day – 8 questions (from Trait Transformation) to change the characteristics of your current situation into something new.
• Trying to Finish the Previously Unfinishable – 5 questions to identify ways to turn incomplete ideas into something salvageable.

Identifying Strategies and Assumptions

• Strategic Thinking Exercise – Resolving Contradictory Assumptions Easily – 2 questions to sort through assumptions which seem to point in opposite directions.
• Don’t Overthink It? 5 Key Questions for Quick Decisions – 5 questions to get through decisions more quickly.
• There’s No Accounting for Taste – 3 questions with more beneficial criteria (other than “I like it”) to determine if you creative work is on strategy.
• Ask and You Shall Receive with Great Strategic Questions – 5 questions to help someone expand on their ideas.

Extreme Creativity Questions

• 9 Extreme Creativity Questions from Peter’s Laws – 9 questions to push creative possibilities to reach extreme creativity levels.
• Extreme Creativity – 10 Brainstorming Questions from Diners, Drive-Ins, & Dives - Guy Fieri visits crazy restaurants where they serve up incredible food and extreme creativity questions galore!

Strategic Marketing Questions

• 20 Innovative Strategic Planning Questions to Prepare for 2012 – 20 questions from a variety of marketing and strategy experts to tweak and improve a marketing effort through strategy, marketing communications, and content marketing.
• Nobody Cares About You!!! – 2 questions to test whether your communications efforts are audience-oriented.
• It’s the Most Memorable Time of the Year – 8 questions to look for ways to strengthen personal interest and better integrate emotional dimensions to increase memorability.

Sales and Business Development Questions

• You’re a Business Solutions Provider? If You Claim It, Prove It – 6 questions to test if your marketing and sales effort is really delivering the “solutions” you promise.
• Do You Want More Business? 10 Questions to Identify Sales Opportunities – 10 questions to ask prospective clients to identify new business development opportunities.

Questions to Perform More Effective Recaps

• It’s Great to Learn from Your Mistakes…Once! – 8 questions to dissect what didn’t go right so it never happens again.

There you go with more than 200 strategic planning questions. Do you have any questions? Let us know! – Mike Brown

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Working on developing a brand strategy for a client’s brand re-launch, we were brainstorming potential phrases for its brand promise and brand dimensions. We were starting with an extensive list of words we’d developed through a variety of brand-related strategic thinking exercises. While trying out word combinations to describe our client’s brand, we happened upon a new branding exercise.

Where Does Your Brand Live?

Here’s the scenario for this strategic thinking exercise:

Imagine your brand is relocating to an intersection in a new part of town where you get to select the names of the cross streets that will make up your brand address. With that freedom, what are the best names for the two streets where your brand lives?

As an example, we were at the seemingly ubiquitous Panera Bread for our meeting. You can imagine Panera Bread being located at the intersection of:

• Soups and Salads
• Meetings and Greetings
• Scones and Smoothies
• Drinks and Links (i.e., networking)
• Comfort Food and Uncomfortable Booths

Each of those intersections says something different about the Panera Brand brand – and that’s the point.

Don’t confine yourself to one set of cross streets. Imagine a whole variety of cross streets that could potentially be the current or, more importantly, the ideal address for your brand.

And once you have a long list of street name combinations, think about the possibilities relative to these questions:

• What others companies would be located near this intersection? Are they in your industry or other industries?
• What are the intersections where your competitors are located?
• How busy is your brand intersection?
• Is this intersection a prime location? Are property values around this intersection rising? Why or why not?
• Do people live in this area or do they just visit and leave?
• Why WOULD customers want to visit this intersection in this part of town?
• How likely is it that your intersection will, as other famous intersections have (think 12^th Street and Vine), be immortalized in a song?

The answers to all these questions should help you look at your brand and its strategic position relative to competitors and customers in a new and different way.

Strategic Thinking Exercises from the Brainzooming Lab

Most of the strategic thinking exercises we share have been well tested in client sessions.

This brand strategy exercise, however?

Well, we just came up with it last weekend! We’ll be trying this branding exercise out and welcome you to see how it works for you. If you take a shot at it, let us know how it works for helping clarify your new or existing brand strategy. - 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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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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Yesterday’s post explored sixteen signals to identify when strategizing becomes procrastination, stopping you from moving forward with implementation. At the heart of many of the sixteen signals is apprehension with decision making for various reasons.

In light of the challenges we all (okay, maybe most of us) face at times with making decisions on a timely basis, here is a recap list of Brainzooming articles on making successful decisions.

Decision Making Techniques

1. Don’t Overthink It? 5 Key Questions for Quick Decisions

Here are five ways to constrain thinking when it’s too easy to take more time to make decisions. Chopping off some available time, resources, and possibilities can get you to a decision much faster.

2. 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.

3. Strategic Thinking Exercise – Simply Making Big Decisions

Your approach for making big decisions doesn’t have to be overly complicated. It can be as simple as listing your criteria and asking yes or no questions about the options you’re considering.

4. Black and White Decision Making? Today, Change to Grey (and Vice Versa)

There are benefits to consciously changing your typical decision making style, even if temporarily.

5. Project Management – 15 Techniques When Time Is Running Down

I enjoy events because they have a built-in deadline: at some point, the event will start, and all decisions are either made or you’ve lost the chance to tinker any longer. When looking at all deadlines as “events,” these techniques help focus and move forward when time is running down.

Decision Making with Teams

6. Level 5 Decisions – Decision Making without Your Influence

Maybe part of your decision making challenge is you are trying to make too many decisions yourself. This helpful strategic thinking approach helps move decisions away from you toward your team so everyone can be more effective.

7. Striving for Simple Revolutionary Ideas

This prioritization and decision making approach not only helps identify winning ideas, it takes best advantage of using both individuals and groups working through a group decision making process efficiently.

Prioritization

8. Built for Discomfort – An Alternative Prioritization Strategy for Innovation

If the easy decision is always the decision that gets made, this prioritization strategy will help force a group to more strongly consider uncomfortable ideas that can be more challenging but also more beneficial.

9. Prioritizing Things Others Are Depending Upon

When you’re in a team situation, delaying a decision or action can really screw things up for the next person in the process. This alternative prioritization approach places a premium on taking actions that set the next person up for success.

Dealing with Varied Decision Making Situations

10. Making a Decision – 7 Situations Begging for Quick Decisions

It can be easy to lose sight of the bigger picture and turn small decisions into protracted ones. This guide adds some perspective to seven common decision making situations that could be quick decisions once you strip away everything that’s surrounding them.

11. Market Research – 5 Ways to Not Screw Up Focus Group Decision Making

As a market researcher, I’m quick to support the idea of getting market input to help make better decisions. If you misuse market research as a way to tap market input, however, you can make the situation worse. Here’s how to not screw up focus groups if you’re using them.

12. Is Your Brand Headed for Trouble? 5 Strategic Warning Signs

While decision making isn’t the central focus of this article, poor decision making is at the  heart of these strategic warning signs that suggest a brand is heading for trouble, if it’s not already present and accounted for in Troubleville. – 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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