The Brainzooming Group

Three incidents happened recently that show that at times, focus is overrated.

• Meeting a friend for lunch and FOCUSED on getting into the restaurant right on time, I parked, bolted for the door, and walked directly past him sitting in the car right next to mine.
• I bought an audio birthday card for a friend. I FOCUSED on it playing the theme from “The Twilight Zone” when buying it because it tied to something going on in her life right now. When discussing it later, it recalled for her a shared connection to the song from nearly ten years before. That very personal connection completely escaped me when I purchased it.
• My wife and I were looking for an orange shirt to replace one that I’d ruined with permanent marker (it’s a bit of an occupational hazard, unfortunately). She was holding up a possible shirt when I became FOCUSED on exactly the orange shirt I wanted and made a beeline past her toward the rack where it was hanging. Moments later when she called my attention to the shirt again, I reacted as if it were the first time seeing it. She said that she’d held it up for me to see not five minutes before. But once I saw the orange shirt, it wouldn’t have mattered if a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model had been standing there; I’d have missed her.

Focus can be great when facing a critical task and you can tune out distractions, but too much focus can cause you to completely miss the obvious. That’s why it’s important to either force yourself to break focus or to seek perspectives from others who aren’t as focused on your issues as you are. In that way, you can help avoid looking foolish (or worse) for ignoring something staring everybody else in the face.

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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Growing up reading Mad Magazine, I found it humorous that it described the editorial staff as “the usual gang of idiots.” Often, in trying to creatively solve business challenges you can find yourself involving the same people every time – it’s the “usual gang of idiots” phenomenon.

• Ask a friend who is a creative thinker to participate, even if they don’t know your business.
• See if someone new in your company could introduce a fresh perspective.
• Change scenery and go somewhere different to think (Some co-workers stole away to a local hotel recently and did a creative session at a big table in the hotel’s lower corridor. Fresh ambiance for no cost!)
• Buy unusual magazines and do the magazine random idea exercise – page through each one, using images and words on each page to trigger new ideas for your thinking challenge.

Try one or more of these to help your “gang of idiots” come up with anything but usual answers to your challenges!

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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List 10 experiences that have ignited your creativity in the past. Also list 10 new experiences that you believe would trigger your creativity if you had the opportunity to do them.

Now figure out ways you can realize these twenty experiences either today, next week, next month, or next year so that you have a schedule of creative days planned in advance to recharge yourself.

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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There are several posts here about looking at situations in different ways.

Another new way to look at things became evident while riding a backward roller coaster at Elitch Gardens. These coasters go out and then return you backwards along the same track. The Boomerang roller coaster provided a wonderful and surprising sensation since it was impossible to match up the forward and backward experiences as mere opposites. Going through the ride backward created completely different sensations.

We likely all have processes that we’ve run in a particular direction time after time. Take a cue from the new sensations created by the Boomerang and step through a familiar process backwards. Starting from the end and working your way to the beginning of a process can yield truly new insights to help make the forward process even stronger.

Valerie

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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Dave Wessling, one of my all-time most influential teachers, shared many comments that have shaped my thinking in so many ways. One that’s particularly relevant recently is, “Form should reinforce meaning.” It’s a great rule to apply when developing and assessing creative material against an underlying strategy.

The principle basically challenges you to consider everything (i.e., color, position, sequence, pacing, volume, length, vocabulary, position, shape, movement, tonality, etc.) surrounding a communications message (the form) relative to how strongly it supports the meaning of the message being conveyed. Substitute “creative” for “form” and “strategy” for “meaning” and you have a maxim you can use over and over again:

“Creative should reinforce strategy.”

You’ll never go wrong applying this principle in business, and particularly in marketing decision making. It’s especially helpful in an environment where people are advancing interesting, intriguing, even cool creative ideas that have little to do with any underlying strategy foundation.

Asking if the creative reinforces the strategy at the appropriate time (i.e., during a specific evaluation period and NOT during a divergent thinking exercise), will lead to making better strategy decisions and producing messages with stronger impacts. - Mike Brown

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 brainzooming@gmail.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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Dive into your music collection or an online music source to create mixes tailored to all the creative situations you may be facing. Some possibilities include:

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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This is a non-traditional approach shared by motivational speaker Ed Foreman: when you have a big goal that you tell others about, many of them will try to explain why you shouldn’t have a goal that big or how come you’ll never achieve it.

His answer? Keep your big goals to yourself and don’t share them with others. In that way, you avoid all the negative advice and can move toward your big creative goal mentally unfettered.

I dismissed the approach when I first heard about it, but my wife of 21 years (as of today) has used it to cross numerous projects off her list without having to listen to me explain why we shouldn’t be doing them!

Happy Anniversary Cyndi!!!

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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