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Today’s list of strategic thinking questions is the last installment in our series based on the June 2013 Fast Company magazine and its list of The 100 Most Creative People in Business 2013. All of the strategic thinking questions were inspired by profiles from the Fast Company 100 Most Creative People in Business list for this year.

It’s exciting that today’s post features someone on the list I actually know: Sheryl Connelly, the Futurist at Ford Motor Company. I met Sheryl at a marcus evans conference in 2008 where we were both speaking. One year later, she was our kickoff speaker when I chaired the American Marketing Association’s national Marketing Research Conference. The strategic thinking question Sheryl Connelly inspired is the first listed under Strategy.

Across all three articles covering the strategic thinking questions the list inspired, you should definitely be able to find a few you can apply to your business or career to get you thinking of creative ideas to put you on the list in 2014!

Insights and Strategy Questions Inspired by the Fast Company 100 Most Creative People in Business 2013

The final thirty-one strategic thinking questions address insights and strategy.

Insights Questions

If you have access to “big data,” what are you doing to improve your human ability to ask insightful questions? (1. Nate Silver - PRINCIPAL, FIVETHIRTYEIGHT; AUTHOR)

How many customers are inside your company and how easily can they supply market information? (69. Emily Sugihara - FOUNDER, BAGGU)

How would you describe the emotional transitions your data is going through? (93. Eitan Grinspun - CODIRECTOR, COMPUTER GRAPHICS GROUP, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY)

Can you tell stories from your data? Can you find predictive relationships in your stories? (99-100. Hilary Mason and Leslie Bradshaw - CHIEF SCIENTIST, BITLY; COO, GUIDE)

Strategy Questions

How are you going to start regularly bringing examples into your organization of other businesses dealing with comparable issues to the ones you face? (24. Sheryl Connelly - FUTURIST, FORD MOTOR CO.)

When is it possible to test your idea on a radically small group and get enough confidence to move forward based on the feedback? (11. Carl June - PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA)

What new ways can you make it easier for your employees to share ideas and shape your company? (23. Art Peck - PRESIDENT OF GROWTH, INNOVATION & DIGITAL–A DIVISION OF GAP, INC.)

In what ways do you imagine young women will change your industry? (29. Reshma Saujani - FOUNDER, GIRLS WHO CODE)

How could it be better to fix a big problem you face by undoing the problem rather than putting another fix on a previous fix? (3. Diana Balmori - PRINCIPAL, BALMORI ASSOCIATES)

How could you better use your speed, expertise, and strategic thinking to disrupt a tired industry? (31 Tony Fadell and Hosain Rahman - FOUNDER, CEO, NEST LABS; FOUNDER, CEO, JAWBONE)

Looking at your internal processes, how do you break what you do into little pieces that allow you to create many more combinations than you can right now? (33. Ayah Bdeir - FOUNDER, CEO, LITTLEBITS)

How soon is the next time you’ll list everything you think is essential to your business and then cut the list by 50 percent? (36. Katie Rae - MANAGING DIRECTOR, TECHSTARS BOSTON)

How can you go “shopping” with your customers, no matter what “shopping” looks like, to gain breakthrough product ideas? (38. Evelyn Mazzocco - SVP OF CREATIVE, GLOBAL GIRLS’ AND GAMES BRANDS, MATTEL)

What more could you do to grow the rate and accuracy of insights your organization produces weekly? (39. Jill Beraud - CEO, LIVING PROOF)

How can you improve your ability to break even small problems into smaller, solvable parts? (41. Ruchi Sanghvi - HEAD OF OPERATIONS, DROPBOX)

What are new ways your organization can use yield management principles to improve productivity or grow revenue? (42. Susan Chapman - SVP OF GLOBAL REAL ESTATE AND WORKPLACE ENABLEMENT, AMERICAN EXPRESS)

Where are you looking for talent among teenagers who could contribute exciting new ideas to your business? (43. Kelvin Doe – INVENTOR)

What has your industry known about for years has great potential yet has never been delivered to customers to create new value? (44. Antonio Mata - PRESIDENT, MATA & ASSOCIATES)

How about immediately asking anyone who complains to you about a constraint, “How is that constraint really the best opportunity you’ve ever had?” 49-57. Urban Outfitters – NINE INDIVIDUALS REMAKING CITY LIVING

How is density, and its tremendous business and growth advantages, becoming a bigger part of your strategy? 49-57. Urban Outfitters – NINE INDIVIDUALS REMAKING CITY LIVING

If you’re a solopreneur, what are you doing to increase the number of people you MUST interact with daily (in the interest of stimulating conversations, exchanges, and ideas)? Where is your brand plotted on a simple vs. elegant x-y chart? (58. D.A. Wallach - ARTIST IN RESIDENCE, SPOTIFY)

If you’re trying to launch a business, how could doing what you do for a worthy cause get you the attention you need? (59. Agnello Dias - COFOUNDER, CREATIVE DIRECTOR, TAPROOT INDIA)

How can you give new customers a better view of the third or fourth thing you can do to serve them? (60. Peter Marino – ARCHITECT)

If your brand is trying to catch up to #1 in your industry, what can you consciously do differently instead of trying to do the same things as the leader? (61. Tom Cibrowski - SENIOR EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, GOOD MORNING AMERICA)

If you start with what’s left-over, unused, forgotten, and rejected, what things can you create from them? (62. Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu - FOUNDER, CEO, SOLEREBELS)

Who are the absolute best potential partners in the absolute worst performing areas of what you do? (65. Lynn Jurich - COFOUNDER, CO–CEO, SUNRUN)

If you wrote the introductory press release for a new project or process before you even started on it, what expectations would the press release set? (72. Ian Spalter - DIRECTOR OF DESIGN AND UX, FOURSQUARE)

When your brand gains serendipitous entry into a new audience or market, what steps are you taking to build on it so it’s not a fleeting success? (86. Heidi Ueberroth - PRESIDENT, NBA INTERNATIONAL)

For the important problems you can’t solve, how can you tell stories about them to reach someone who CAN solve them? (89. Christy Turlington Burns - FOUNDER, EVERY MOTHER COUNTS)

When imagining potential business partnerships, who else is commanding the time, attention, and dollars your audience has available? (9. Tracey Bleczinski - VP OF CONSUMER PRODUCTS, NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE)

How can you win over to your cause the enemy that knows your fatal flaw (and is in the best position to help you get better)? (95. John Hering - COFOUNDER, CEO, LOOKOUT MOBILE SECURITY)

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.

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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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

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.

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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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

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.

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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It’s always very rewarding when people appreciate Brainzooming blog content and find value from applying our strategy, creativity, and innovation ideas in their careers. It’s especially fun when there’s an opportunity to extend the Brainzooming message into new venues in collaboration with others.

Today, we’re highlighting two people who’ve been particularly kind in their appreciation for our content and in featuring Brainzooming content through their own social media presences.

Join Us and Let’s Talk Live on the WiseTalk Teleconference, May 30

Sue Bethanis, Founder and CEO of Mariposa Leadership, has been a recent, much appreciated retweeter of Brainzooming content. While Sue is newer to Twitter, she’s been hosting the monthly WiseTalk Leadership Forum since 2004 when she published her book, Leadership Chronicles of a Corporate Sage: Five Keys to Becoming a More Effective Leader.

One interesting wrinkle to WiseTalk is since it’s a live teleconference (before becoming an archived recording), listeners can ask live questions via phone and email.

This opportunity to converse and shape the content to the live audience’s interests is just one reason why I’m looking forward to being a guest on the hour-long 99^th episode of WiseTalk on Thursday, May 30, 2013 at 2 pm EDT. Sue and I will be talking about the Brainzooming approach to strategic and creative thinking, plus anything else you want to talk about specifically!

Since it’s too infrequent that I get to talk live with Brainzooming readers, I’d love to take the opportunity to do so during WiseTalk. Plus if it’s a really great show with lots of call-in questions, maybe we’ll make the greatest hits 100^th episode!

Register Today for WiseTalk and Let’s Talk Live!

How do you join in to help shape our May 30^th WiseTalk conversation?

Register for the May 30 WiseTalk teleconference right away on the Mariposa Leadership website to get your dial-in information.

Check out Stephen Lahey and the Small Business Talent Podcast

Stephen Lahey, a great phone and social media friend, is the self-proclaimed #1 Brainzooming fan! Stephen is the successful leader of Lahey Consulting, a search firm and HR consultancy he founded in 2000, with a focus on marketing recruitment and retention.

Additionally, earlier this year Stephen introduced SmallBusinessTalent.com® to help business people take advantage of their “knowledge and talent to attract more ideal clients.” Among the free resources Stephen offers on Small Business Talent is a weekly half-hour podcast providing in-depth information small business people can directly benefit from in the varied roles they play.

I was honored to be the first guest on the Small Business Talent podcast when it debuted in January 2013. Stephen and I talked about how blogging, social media, and content marketing specifically apply for small businesses, including how it fits into The Brainzooming Group business strategy. You can listen to the kick-off podcast here or on SmallBusinessTalent.com®, along with all the fantastic guests Stephen has interviewed.

Stephen has made quite an impact in such a short time with the podcast. In talking with Stephen, he has some very exciting, big name authors coming up in the near future. Additionally, we’ve talked about doing another podcast soon to dive deeper into content marketing strategy for small business. To get the first word on when that’s scheduled along with updates on Stephen’s other weekly guests, sign up for Stephen’s email list today!

What’s Next?

We have several other public appearances coming up in July, including a live, in-depth webinar on strategic thinking and a  social media workshop in Boston. More on those later, but in the meantime, let’s talk May 30! – 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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We’re big believers in strong connections between strategy and creative work. It’s been a topic on the blog, and it’s a key component of the strategic thinking workshops I conduct.

Strategy and Creative Work Passing in the Daylight

I was talking recently with someone involved on a team creating a response for a customer inquiry. For various reasons, team members building the strategy for the response worked separately from those addressing the creative elements. Since the strategy people and the creative people were working one after the other, instead of together, a variety of late in the process issues developed.

As the person sharing the story related it, some issues were addressed successfully, many were addressed in a compromised fashion, and some were never addressed in an integrated way.

Eeeek!

5 Reasons Strategy and Creative Work Must Be Integrated

Listening to this person’s frustration prompts these five reasons it’s vital for strategy and creative work to be integrated. In this example, all five reasons contributed to falling short in creating an optimal response.

When a strategy and creative team are working together . . .

1. The creative team can do initial design with an integrated view of the end product

Without knowing key decisions the strategy team was making over the course of a week, the creative team sat idle awaiting input. By the time creative team members received the nearly final content, team members were behind the gun to get the creative design turned around with adequate review time to meet the deadline.

2. It allows the strategy team to efficiently deliver direction and content

The strategy team didn’t understand the final format the creative team was creating. As a result, they threw “stuff” over the wall to the creative team in ways that made sense from a strategic standpoint. What was convenient for the strategy team wasn’t optimal for the creative team, unfortunately, since the divided team didn’t talk throughout the development process.

3. Clarifying questions from the creative team can be placed in context

As the work moved into creative development, the creative team asked for more input from the strategy team. Because strategy team members lacked a frame of reference, they viewed the request as too encompassing for the time available. The result was the strategy team passed on sharing additional information. After the fact, strategy team members discovered they had over-estimated what the creative team was asking for in the request, creating a gap that went unaddressed.

4. It keeps creative team members from guessing when needing to fill last minute blanks

No matter how well a process is planned and managed, there will be last minute details and gaps to be filled. In this case, because the strategy and creative teams were disconnected, the creative team wound up filling last minute blanks without sufficient input. Some blanks were filled appropriately; others weren’t.

5. The creative team won’t leave out important things because they don’t fit the design

The strategy team had made decisions about the customer response’s positioning and compelling support points to reinforce the recommendation. Lacking visibility to the decisions or a strategic understanding why it received some of the content, the creative team varied the positioning and left out significant detail behind the support points. Why? The content didn’t fit the design and creative direction developed in isolation.

Sounds like a cluster? That’s why strategy and creative efforts need to be integrated.

As a former associate used to say, “This wasn’t open heart surgery. No one died.”

That’s certainly true in this case, but the disconnect between the strategy and creative teams created a needlessly under-optimized business result. That’s just one reason why when we’re conducting a live strategy, business performance, or innovation workshop for a client, we push for having both strategic and creative team members included.

You can’t have one or the other group represented and expect the most successful result.

Are you with us on how imperative it is to connect strategy and creative work? What do you do to make sure it happens as successfully as possible? – Mike Brown

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Learn all about Mike Brown’s creative thinking and innovation presentations!

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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Hang on with me as we slam together a couple of apparently random experiences this week. Trust me; we’ll wind up with a strategic lesson here.

Instigating a Strategic Lesson

A reading at morning mass this week from the Gospel of John involved Jesus talking about the apostles being “in the world” but not “of” the world. The point is since His followers should focus on the importance of a heavenly reward, time in this world needs to be marked by a sense of detachment. While human functioning, making a living, and being of service to others are important, the expectation is to resist becoming overly enamored with things (in particular) that belong to this world since they are fleeting relative to eternity.

This may seem a simple enough statement, but the world beckons so strongly with so many attractive diversions – both good and (many) bad – that it’s an incredibly challenging call to live out successfully.

Another Version of the Strategic Lesson

My trainer recently had me begin using myfitnesspal, a weight and fitness monitoring app. I whined like crazy, but within days, the accountability of logging all my exercise and everything I ate changed my behavior dramatically. Seeing the numbers behind my eating caused me to cut down on snacking, especially late at night when I am writing.

One number that surprises me daily is the outrageous amount of sodium in pre-prepared foods.

One day I had a partial order of leftover Chinese food for lunch, munched an appetizer at a happy hour meeting, and ate a sandwich based on a recipe from my family’s former restaurant that my wife made for dinner. When everything was plugged into myfitnesspal, my daily sodium intake was nearly double the recommended amount. The surprising thing about my huge sodium intake is I pick up a salt shaker once a year – maybe.  I don’t add salt to food.

Slamming Two Experiences Together

If you had asked me before myfitnesspal, I’d have confidently told you I was “IN but not OF a salt-filled world.”

My gigantic sodium number tells a very different story tough.

It’s clear that through uninformed and lackadaisical decision making about what I eat daily, there is way too much sodium in my diet. What has seemed harmless or not even an issue is, I now realize, something harmful.

And the Strategic Lesson Is?

As an entrepreneur, it’s easy to decide what you plan to do to build your business.

It seems even easier though, to pursue other enticing (potentially overhyped) possibilities that promise to build your business – but not directly and not right away.

In my case, these activities include creating content in lots of venues, exploring intriguing possibilities, and putting additional time into opportunities that once seemed promising. They all tend to be about reaching a new / different / bigger audience that SHOULD yield even greater success than the same old audience.

Absent some way to measure and monitor how much time, energy, and effort is going into all these enticing activities relative to the solid activities to build a business however, you can get away completely from what matters for your business.

The cumulative impact is you wind up being not just in a world of overhyped possibilities, but spending most of your available time on them.

When we started The Brainzooming Group, I sketched out a decision making hierarchy for ranking and narrowing promising but more speculative activities. Because of my interest in trying new things and challenges in saying “No,” that decision hierarchy is still in a long-ago shelved notebook.

So the strategic lesson from these random events this week is it’s time to actually apply the decision making hierarchy and stick to it.

How about you? Can you benefit from this strategic lesson in your business?

By the way, thanks for hanging on with me to get here. – 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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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

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.

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.

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:

Continue Reading