The Brainzooming Group

On April 2, 2013, I had the wonderful opportunity to present for the first time at a TEDx event: TEDxWyandotte. This inaugural TEDx event took place at Kansas City Kansas Community College (KCKCC).

Creative Ideas and Diversity at TEDxWyandotte

My topic of my presentation and the video is “Diversity and Ideas in the Porous Community.”

Its focus, which is right at the heart of the Brainzooming message on creative ideas and diversity, explored the importance of creating communities open to ideas from diverse and external perspectives. In keeping with the presentation theme, I invited audience members at two different points to select the story they wanted to hear next from among three options. This approach, which I call a “live blog,” puts the audience in control of shaping the talk they most want to hear from among, in this case, nine different possible versions.

Using the TEDx constraints (limited time) and admonitions (share stories you’ve never told) created an opportunity to weave together a completely new collection of content about creative ideas and diversity, including a childhood story no one outside my immediate family had ever heard before the audience selected it.

“Diversity and Ideas in the Porous Community” Video – Mike Brown – TEDxWyandotte

I really appreciate the invitation and opportunity to participate in TEDxWyandotte from its curator Shari Wilson and Jay Matlack, Workforce Development Coordinator at KCKCC. The overall theme for TEDxWyandotte was “Core Impact,” and I’d definitely invite you to check out the work of the other presenters to see how they interpreted the theme in their own TEDx talks:

• Shari Hall – “Are You a Superhero?”
• Adam Arrondando – “Minds on Fire–Inside the Mind of an Entrepreneur”
• Mary B. Lucas – “Remember the Comeback Sauce”
• Making Movies – “Sustainable Music in a Disposable Culture”
• Brett Ramey – “Converging Rivers-Refreshing Place-Based Food Systems”

It was particularly rewarding to present at TEDxWyandotte because KCKCC feels like home in many ways. My wife led the student activities at KCKCC for ten years at the start of her career. Because of that, prior to TEDxWyandotte, I’d been on stage at KCKCC many times playing the scary monster at Halloween parties Cyndi organized for students’ kids! It also felt like home because my parents attended, marking the first time they’d visited Kansas City in many years because of illnesses my dad has since put behind him.

And when it came to telling untold stories at TEDxWyandotte, my father was more than happy to share any stories I didn’t tell with anyone who stopped by to chat before, during, and after the event. He just didn’t have to keep his stories to less than 18 minutes total! – Mike Brown

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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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Woody Bendle is back today with an innovation process lesson all about how innovation success depends on finding things that won’t work. Here’s Woody! 

Innovation Process – Prepare to Find Ways that Won’t Work

“I haven’t failed; I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work” - Thomas A. Edison

For most, the innovation process probably feels a lot like this quote from Edison. Attempt after attempt just keeps coming up a little (or a lot) short. Not only can this be frustrating, it can also be costly. I’m not only talking about the costs associated with the ‘failed’ innovation attempts – those are actually the costs of doing business in today’s economy. But rather, I’m talking about these types of experiences resulting in the pursuit of innovation being aborted altogether. That’s more than costly; that’s a death sentence for your business!

The thing is though, if you are taking calculated risks in an attempt to create a new future, this is exactly what it will feel like.

You are absolutely going to find many many ways and things that won’t work. And why shouldn’t you? You’re attempting to do something that has not been done before, and for which, there is no known outcome.  Unless you’ve got a crystal ball, I can guarantee you that you will encounter many ways that won’t work!  So be prepared.

5 Components of Innovation Preparedness

The innovation process is essentially an experiment. Even if the overall outcome doesn’t turn out like you had envisioned or hoped, it can still be a highly valuable experiment! That is, as long as you are prepared.

In order to maximize your innovation learning and chances for future successes, you need to prepare yourself and your organization for the inevitable, which is, finding ways that won’t work – and learning from it!

There are at least five things you need to be prepared for as you pursue innovation. You need to be prepared to:

1. Find way’s that won’t work – but that doesn’t mean you should go into an innovation attempt planning to fail!
2. Figure out why your attempt (or which aspects of your attempt) didn’t work.
3. Rigorously dissect every dimension of your innovation attempt along the way to determine which aspects of it are successful.
4. Memorialize and socialize what you’ve learned
5. Refine your current attempt (or even start all over again) by leveraging everything you have learned.

If you adhere to the five innovation preparedness elements above as you embark upon each and every innovation initiative, you will significantly increase your chances for future successful innovation!

Now let’s get innovating! - Woody Bendle

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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.

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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An organization contacted us about facilitating a large, multi-organization strategic planning session. They ultimately decided, since the timing was tight and a lot of the details hadn’t been decided, to facilitate it themselves internally.

Shortly after the meeting, I heard about it via a couple of participants. Fifteen minutes was scheduled for introductions. TWO HOURS LATER, introductions wrapped up. Turns out, getting nearly two hours behind at the meeting’s start was the highlight of the two-day experience. It was supposedly all downhill from there, with a lot of questions about what, if anything, came from flying a large number of people to a relatively remote location in the middle of the country to meet.

Have you been in one of “those” meetings previously? I know I have.

While it seems like anyone can facilitate a meeting (I mean who CAN’T stand in front of a group and write things on a big pad of paper), it’s just not true that anyone can.

Strategic Planning and 5 Dangers of NOT Hiring a Professional Facilitator

When an organization tries cheaping out and not using a strong professional facilitator who can design and carry out an interactive strategic planning session, it COSTS an organization in at least five big ways:

1. You burn up participant goodwill

You may have only one shot to get a board or other stakeholder group to agree to participate in a strategic planning session based on their interest in the organization or initiative. If you frustrate them with an unproductive meeting, you COST yourself important goodwill you may have built up with them.

2. You don’t make a big enough and sustainable enough move forward

If a strategic planning session is really intent on driving big change, frittering away the opportunity to harness the expertise you’ve assembled to pave the way for big change will COST time and positive returns as you wait to cycle back until your next opportunity to push for big change.

3. You blow through opportunity or hard dollar costs

Even if you think you are not writing many checks to pay for your strategic planning session, there are still opportunity costs for the participants’ time investments. When a poorly designed meeting wastes the time for the participants, it COSTS you because you send a clear signal that you don’t respect their time investment in what you’ve asked them to help accomplish.

4. You stretch patience, not imagination and creativity

When a poorly designed strategic thinking session fails to push an organization’s imagination and creativity in a productive way, it winds up pushing the wrong buttons instead, i.e. impatience and boredom. The COST comes from failing to excite the organization to grow and develop to be more competitive and successful.

5. Stakeholders won’t take it seriously in the future

When you summon people for a strategic planning meeting and it goes nowhere, the next time you try to do the same thing – even if you have stepped up to using a professional facilitator, you will have COST your organization the active participation of stakeholders you burned previously. Why should they believe the next time will be any different? And you’ve not only tarnished their enthusiasm for your organization’s strategic planning efforts, you’ve done it for any other organization for which they may be involved.

So how beneficial is it to hire a strategic planning facilitator?

If you’re serious about wanting a productive, efficient, and interactive strategic planning, strategic thinking, or creative development experience for your organization, call us. Please call us. Don’t COST your organization in stupid ways. We’ll show you how hiring a strategic planning facilitator will deliver a positive return right away, and down the road! – Mike Brown

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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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What got me originally thinking about yesterday’s Brainzooming column on career training when school’s out for you was a client request. She wanted ideas for assessing her organization’s marketing performance. I delivered a diagnostic from the files used by a high-priced marketing support organization my former employer belonged to for several years.

I realized during my corporate life there were incredible learning resources readily available all around, although they didn’t necessarily look like learning resources. The exact moment I realized this was when we were investing a million dollars for a high-end consulting firm to help us create a strategic marketing plan. While many peers complained about all these Northwestern and Stanford MBAs trying to tell them what to do, I saw it as the company investing in helping us all become better strategic marketers.

Taking that view, I soaked up everything possible and even got them to bring in other resources to teach us including a guy whose only job was to help them think about how to logically structure presentations.

And yeah, I saved nearly everything and developed strategic thinking tools beyond what they provided. Many of those learning opportunities and resources (both excellent and crappy) were important early inspirations for creating our Brainzooming methodology.

16 Learning Resources for Everyday

If you take a similar, broad approach to the learning resources around you, I’m guessing you’ll find a lot of ways to keep learning and continually enhance your career training – even during times when typical training expenditures may be reduced.

Consider this list of 16 learning resources your employer may be dangling in front of you right now to improve your career training:

• Consultants and outside experts working on your business
• Training and lunch-and-learn programs
• Working on new initiatives for the company
• Time with internal mentors
• Actively participating and using resources from industry association memberships
• Reference materials available within the business
• Opportunities to create your own reference materials
• Observing and asking questions of smart people
• Documenting learnings from projects and other work you do
• Experimenting and trying new work approaches
• Subscriptions – whether online, print, or some other form
• Attending events and conferences
• Volunteering to speak on behalf of the company at conferences
• Business travel
• Exposure to new technology
• Becoming great friends with smart and experienced colleagues

As you can tell, these 16 learning resources take on different forms. And the list doesn’t even include all the free and low-cost resource available online.

Redefining Career Training and Learning Resources

The point is, consider defining your job, at least in one respect, as an ongoing career training opportunity. When you do, your eyes open to a whole variety of learning opportunities you might have previously ignored.

So coupled with yesterday column, are you ready to start planning your career training for next semester? You have all summer to do it! – Mike Brown

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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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School’s out for the summer – or soon will be – for those who are in “school.”

For those of us officially out of school, however, is school ever out?

If we’re in the midst of a career, shouldn’t we be learning all the time?

The answers to these questions are “no” and “yes,” by the way.

How many of us though, unless our employer is doing it, approach career training formally – with a planned curriculum involving both traditional and non-traditional learning and grades reflecting our progress?

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t.

I have a long list of interests where I want to learn more. I read and experiment with those, maybe taking some classes or going to learning events. Mostly though, I read random articles or blog posts on these topics and stop. But devising a comprehensive learning plan? I gave that up when I walked out after completing Dr. Jauch’s business policy (affiliate link) final to wrap up grad school.

4-Step Career Training Plan to Learn More this Year

So how about this relatively simple 4-step plan to work on during the traditional summer vacation from school to make sure you are moving your career training ahead?

1. Pick Your Curriculum

Identify two topics where you want to improve your knowledge, skills, and proficiency. They may be directly work related or of a more personal interest. Either way, actually write down that you’re tackling them next fall (or right away, if you’re going for extra credit).

2. Select Your Learning Resources

Next, plan where and how you’re going to improve your expertise in these two areas in the near future. And “near future” doesn’t mean “whenever,” but during the next school semester. Start right now identifying several sources and activities in each area that will grow and test your mastery and progress.

3. Decide Your Class and Study Schedule

3. Once you know what you’re studying and have a general sense of your available learning resources, create your schedule for next semester. Look ahead on your calendar and actually start blocking out one or two learning times or activities you’ll regularly do next semester. Do it now before your calendar fills up with all the other things that pop up and eliminate time you’d like to devote to learning. While your schedule may fluctuate and vary the closer you get, plan for a start and an end – and don’t “cut classes” lightly.

4. Get Ready to Grade Yourself

Finally, as you go through the semester, grade yourself. You get to do it yourself because we’re all big girls and boys. But don’t use a pass / fail scale. Here’s a suggestion:

• A – Clearly demonstrating new levels of proficiency and expertise that’s translating into better results and/or other people recognizing new value you provide
• B – Seeing stronger knowledge and comfort on the topic, but it hasn’t translated into any noticeable differences yet in results / value
• C – You have more knowledge, but there is still much to learn to apply your knowledge as you hoped

Notice there are no D’s or F’s. That’s because if you’ve gotten this far in being more deliberate about learning, you’re ahead of all the other people you work with, whether inside or outside your company, who aren’t trying this!

Are you ready for better career training?

Are you up for going back to school next semester in a more structured way to boost your career training? If so, what topics are you going to study? – Mike Brown

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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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I was the guest on Wise Talk, a long-running teleconference series hosted by Sue Bethanis, the CEO/Founder of Mariposa Leadership. It was a fun conversation and quite enjoyable to answer questions from the Wise Talk listening audience too.

You can click here to listen to Wise Talk episode 99 on Strategy and Creative Thinking.

We explored, among multiple topics, borrowing creative ideas, structures, and strategic approaches from other areas and applying them to what you do. We talked primarily about the What’s It Like exercise we use, and Sue asked about what else we do to help people get comfortable with borrowing ideas, especially when that involves looking at analogous situations to their own.

Since any great question deserves a blog response, Sue’s question was an opportunity to bring together creative thinking exercises filled with more than 50 ideas on borrowing creative ideas – in ethical, productive, and beneficial ways.

Creative Thinking Exercises for Borrowing Creative Ideas

New, Innovative Ideas – Strategy Planning with What’s It Like – The What’s It Like creative thinking exercise is a go-to one to mine analogous strategic models for new creative ideas.

25 Ways to Change Your Character – Change Your Character is a creative thinking exercise to help you borrow ideas from a whole variety of people with different perspectives than you have while dealing with comparable situations.

Readin’ Where They Ain’t – Another way to stay on top of borrowing ideas is to immerse yourself in situations dissimilar to your own while looking for strategic connections.

Steal this Idea! – I stole this creative thinking exercise (no surprise I guess), and it’s a great way to involve an entire team in actively looking for and borrowing creative ideas.

Borrowing Creative Inspiration – 6 Areas to Boost Creative Thinking – It’s beneficial to borrow familiar structures that lend themselves to creative thinking. You can then generate new creative ideas by running your own perspective through these structures.

Borrowing Ideas and Adapting Them

7 Ways to Borrow Creative Ideas with a Clear Conscience - In answer to a question from an audience member about how you ethically borrow creative ideas, this post highlights how to turn inspiration from others into your own ideas.

1 Great Way to Be More Creative Each Day – We borrowed the Trait Transformation creative thinking exercise from Chuck Dymer a long time ago, and repackage it here as a way to easily transform others’ ideas in dramatically different ways to best suit your needs.

Be More Derivative, Creative, and Fun – Katy Perry showed up at an awards show with a completely derivative dress heralded as something new. We turned Katy Perry and her dress into a creative thinking exercise that lets you make the same derivative-to-creative switcheroo.

Reinterpreting Creative Inspiration – 7 Lessons to Borrow Creative Ideas – A performer channeling Judy Garland onstage shared ideas for how she reinterpreted a very well-known person to make her portrayal familiar yet distinct to her performance style.

Making It Clear When Someone Borrows Your Creative Idea

Ideaprints – 9 Signals Your Brain Was All Over a Creative Idea – It can be fun when someone else borrows YOUR creativity and tries to make it THEIR own. Just in case, you can put your ideaprints on your creative ideas to make it more difficult for someone to borrow from you and claim your ideas as their own.  – Mike Brown

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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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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.

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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