The Brainzooming Group

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

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

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

12 Process Change Lessons

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

So far, I have . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 back with another Blogapalooza post from a student in Max Utsler’s Innovation in Marketing Communications class at the University of Kansas.

Today, Judi Reilly, a seasoned marketing professional, highlights reverse innovation as a way to not only bring new products to first world markets, but to power a March Madness team to victory with a strong contribution off the bench. Stumped for how those two connect? Read Judi’s post and see if you can solve the riddle before the closing seconds of her post! Here’s Judi:

Reverse Innovation – Winning March Madness from the Bench by Judi Reilly

If you are among the millions of rabid basketball fans intrigued by both March Madness and innovative business ideas, take note of something beyond the fast breaks, slam dunks, and buzzer beaters. Look for a dominant force sitting on the bench and leading teams in assists that also happens to be a successful outcome of reverse innovation.

Calling time out to better understand reverse innovation makes solving this riddle easier.

Vijay Govindarajan, considered a superstar on the subject, describes reverse innovation (sometimes called trickle-up innovation) as “any innovation that is adopted first in the developing world” and then introduced in industrial nations with consumer demand and a willingness to pay more for the product.

Successful Stars of the Reverse Innovation Game

There are a variety of successful reverse innovation products more likely to be advertisers than sitting on a March Madness bench that illustrate how developing ideas in the developing world can open up new first world markets:

• GE portable ECG machine – These machines, manufactured in India for $1,000, provide mobility in taking the hospital to the patient. GE subsequently introduced a similar product in the U.S. for use on ambulances.
• Mahindra tractors for small farmers – Mahindra first manufactured these tractors in India to assist poor farmers in tending crops and as a means of transportation. They came to the U.S. targeted at hobby farmers, opening up a new industry category.
• Solar-powered charging unit – Social-conscious entrepreneurs created these products as power stations for multiple cell phones in remote, energy-deprived areas of India. In the U.S., the power products thrilled the audience of tech-savvy, outdoor enthusiasts wanting to remotely charge cell phones and tablets.

A Winning Game Plan for Competitive Reverse Innovation

Previously, reverse innovation was the exception rather than the rule. The phenomenon has now started to capture the attention of multinational corporations seeking to be more competitive. C.K. Prahalad, author of “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits,” (affiliate link) provided five early reasons for why developing nations can beat potential challenges to create reverse innovation layups.

1. Product pricing – People in developing countries reject high prices for products from Western markets. Innovation in developing countries requires affordable products to the masses.
2. Cutting to the chase – Developing countries don’t focused on trying to catch up with outdated 20th-century technologies. They embrace “leapfrog” technologies, such as mobile phones and solar energy that are brand new.
3. Service “ecosystems” – Collaboration flourishes more readily between entrepreneurs in developing countries, with start-ups realizing they need each other for survival.
4. Built to last – Third world environments lead to the development of gadgets that stand up to extreme conditions.
5. Don’t spend what you don’t have – With limited financial resources, people in developing countries creatively find alternative and new uses for existing products.

Spot the Omnipresent Reverse Innovation at March Madness Yet?

Now, back to March Madness. Have you spotted the reverse innovation winner on all the competitors’ benches yet?

Here’s one final hint: Rick Newman, a U.S. News.com blogger, says the innovation’s origin dates back to a home remedy mixture of water, sugar and a pinch of salt used in Bangladesh decades ago to battle complications from cholera.

You guessed it! I’m talking about sports drinks, such as category-leading Gatorade and Powerade. They contain a blend of water, carbohydrates, and electrolytes used to rehydrate athletes. In layman’s terms, sports drinks contain water, sugar and salt. Researchers brought the innovation to the U.S. because of consumer need, and it now represents a $4-billion industry.

Until next time, cheer your top pick to the Final Four while pointing out the product of reverse innovation on the sidelines. Score big points with your winning prognostication skills and knowledge of little-known sideline facts. - Judi Reilly 

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

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

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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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Most of the time the Brainzooming blog shares strategy, innovation, and creativity ideas while consciously trying not to tout what we do at The Brainzooming Group. Our hope is by sharing intriguing and insightful content on strategy, innovation, and creativity, you will want to explore more deeply how The Brainzooming Group can improve your organization’s performance. Suffice it to say, we do not toot our own horn too much. (Did you like the way I got both “tout” and “toot” into the same paragraph? That will make the SEO grading apps crazy.)

Why Change Is Hard and 3 Ideas for Making Change Easy

Recently I was reading (okay, listening) to, Switch (affiliate link), the book on change by Chip and Dan Heath. I was struck by how The Brainzooming Group successfully addresses what Chip and Dan Heath identify as three of the main points from Switch addressing why change is hard:

Why Change Is Hard #1: Organizations resist planning for change because it is too complex or too hard

Our Approach for Making Change Easy: At The Brainzooming Group, we refer to this challenge of planning for change as the “can’t get over the hump” problem. We see it repeatedly. Smart organizations with solid people get only so far with developing implementing strategy, but cannot get any further.  Sometimes the answer is strategic thinking tools; sometimes it is resources; sometimes it is strategic focus.

In the Brainzooming process, we analyze what the sticking point is and apply the correct “lubricant” to move the process forward. When you have built up the arsenal of strategic thinking tools and successful creativity approaches we have over the years, finding the answer to move a strategy toward implementation is quick.

Why Change Is Hard #2: People have a fear of failure, so they won’t even try to think about what should be changed, much less make the effort to change it

Our Approach for Making Change Easy: We account for the probability of failure as we design our strategy thinking process. As a result, we inoculate you against being afraid of change. The Brainzooming Group helps you generate a significant number of ideas and concepts as we temper the natural inclination to censor or needlessly debate whether ideas or concepts are good during the early stages of strategic thinking.

We don’t leave you with a pile of uncategorized and unusable ideas, though. We have tested strategic thinking tools to help organize, categorize, and evaluate the new you generate. Knowing the chaff is going to be thrown away helps people not be afraid to generate the kernels of wheat (or nuggets of gold) that lead to successful change.

Why Change Is Hard #3: There is too little attention paid to building upon success and too much attention placed on solving problems

Our Approach for Making Change Easy: The Brainzooming process helps you solve problems. Just as important though, we also help organizations better recognize what they are doing right and provide them the structure and options for building upon that success.

Would You Like to Make Change Easy? At Least Easier than It Has Been?

Thank for indulging this exploration on how the Brainzooming process accomplishes relative to making change easy. We’d love to talk with you about the opportunities and issues in your organization where you are finding change is hard. We’ll return tomorrow to our usual focus on less self-referential issues of strategy, innovation and creativity. Today though, I wanted to point out specific ways we help smart organization make successful change easy. – Barrett Sydnor

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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Barrett Sydnor

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Following up our post on tools and exercises for enhancing strategic thinking skills, I started jotting down a list of clues indicating  you’re not dealing with a strategic thinker.

The reason?

These clues should suggest someone who would most benefit from taking time (if you could get them to do it) and working on the strategic thinking skills to improve business performance.

29 Clues You’re Not Dealing with a Strategic Thinker

As typical, I didn’t begin with a target number of clues for the list. Here are the twenty-nine clues that came to mind.

Photo by: ad Rian | Source: photocase.com

It’s a clue you’re not dealing with a strategic thinker when an individual:

1. Wants to limit strategic conversations to senior management
2. Shuns thinking and perspectives from others
3. Doesn’t respect other business functions in the organization
4. Has a reputation for poor strategic relationships in the organization
5. Feels strategy is complex (or has to be complex to be good)
6. Disconnects strategy from day-to-day organizational activities
7. Doesn’t understand his/her own personal limitations and thus doesn’t compensate for the limitations with a strong, complementary team
8. Becomes easily focused on a personal view of ” reality” and can’t entertain alternative possibilities
9. Is uncomfortable considering multiple ideas and possibilities for addressing a situation
10. Won’t break or even bend an arbitrary rule that doesn’t make sense
11. Is unwilling to question the status quo
12. Is put off by questions from people considered subordinates
13. Is quick to cut off exploration of multiple alternatives in the interest of not over thinking things
14. Struggles to shift between taking time to explore new ideas and then moving to prioritize ideas and make decisions
15. Automatically equates “strategic” with long- term and “tactical” with short-term
16. Struggles with the idea of serving those seen as subordinates
17. Is reluctant to do homework to help prepare others to make solid decisions and implement them successfully
18. Struggles to make challenging decisions
19. Spends too much time on easy, solvable issues that don’t produce value for the organization or its customers
20. Spends more time talking than asking questions to better understand situations
21. Shuts down when faced with dramatic changes to a personal view of reality and/or what’s necessary to sustain that reality
22. Doesn’t function well when there are significant unknowns in a situation
23. Automatically views doing something new / different as better than doing the smartest thing
24. Automatically views doing the same thing as better than doing something different because of lesser perceived risk
25. Loses track of agreed to priorities – for whatever reason
26. Spends too time on things that don’t matter for the organization
27. Struggles to generalize situations so they are more understandable to non- experts
28. Is quicker to argue than finding ways to agree
29. Tends to dominate conversations

Does this list describe anyone familiar to you?

Do you see co-workers’ behaviors in this list? If so, how many of the strategic thinking skills behind this list do the lack? No one is going to have all the strategic thinking skills one could have, but I’m not sure yet how many “Yes” answers signal you will have challenges getting an individual involved in strategic thinking. Based on running some people I’ve worked with previously through the questions, I’m guess a score of 10 or more means someone is a weak, or at least problematic, strategic thinker.

What strategic thinking skill gaps would you add, subtract, or modify on this list?

It would be great to have you shape this list of clues you’re not dealing with someone that has strong strategic thinking skills. You can share your ideas in the comments or check out tomorrow’s post to learn about a more dynamic way to create and have a group participate in collaborating and shaping lists. It’s an idea I’ll be investigating, without a doubt!  - 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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When the Brainzooming blog started, its focus was to be on strategy, creativity, and innovation. In fact, the first five Brainzooming posts in 2007 framed our views on strategic thinking and its importance as widely distributed function within organizations. A number of years later, the compilation of those five posts (our “Strategic Thinking Manifesto”) still receives strong readership and social media sharing.

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

Strategic Thinking as an Ongoing Approach

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

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

4 Characteristics of Solid Strategic Thinking

1. Strategic Thinkers Seek Perspectives from Multiple Sources

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

2. Strategic Thinking Goes Beyond Today’s Reality

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

3. Strategic Thinkers Question Both the Familiar and the New

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

4. Strategic Thinkers Display Both Patience and Impatience

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

Applying Strategic Thinking Daily

Using Rich Strategic Questions

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

Anticipating Future Issues

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

Finding Ideas with Intriguing Connections

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

Generating Many Ideas Quickly

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

Innovating Amid Constraints

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

New Thinking with Old Ideas

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

Addressing Unknowns

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

Efficiency and Results

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

Envisioning Possibilities

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

Telling a Strategic Story

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

Working Across and Up an Organization

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

Managing Challenging People

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

Would Your Organization Benefit from Stronger Strategic Thinking?

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

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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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Last weekend’s Wall Street Journal “Review” section teemed with wonderful reminders of creative ideas. These reminders were helpful for providing a handy creative thinking skills refresher on ideas that can become easy to overlook.

Check out these thirteen creative ideas pulled from three of the Wall Street Journal “Review” articles.

Pick one of these creative thinking ideas and do something about it this week – even if that is as simple as thinking about it for a few moments today. You get bonus points if you actually take action on any of these ideas to enhance your creative thinking skills this week.

13 Creative Thinking Skills worth Remembering

Each creative idea is followed by a reference to the list of articles below from which it came.

Creative Perspective

• How readily do you suspend your cynicism to be able to imagine possibilities? How do you consciously force yourself out of a cynical perspective when that’s needed? (1)
• How often do you give yourself the permission to be “new and stupid”? (1)

Creative Inspiration

• If you derive a lot of creative stimulation through online interactions, how are you regularly creating equal creative stimulation through in-person interactions? (1)
• Do you keep going back to the same creative wells repeatedly? Or do you continually seek out new creative experiences where you do not already know the whole story? (1)
• Do you know where your best ideas come from? (It is okay if you don’t know.) If you can recall where your ideas come from, are they originating from different creative inspirations? (2)

Creative Process

• When you take on a new creative project, do you have a “total immersion” process you go through to become fluent in the new subject? (3)
• As you imagine a new creative project, how are you creating a “look book” with inspiration, depictions, and prototypes for your strategic and creative approach? (3)
• When addressing a traditional topic, are you asking, “What doesn’t matter?” This helps identify unnecessary elements ripe for elimination. (3)
• Are you growing the number of people you know that face similar situations to yours? These are the relationships where you can have candid, deep conversations on challenges and opportunities you both face. (1)
• How are you leaving room for surprise and unexpected twists and turns in your creative projects? (2)
• If you enjoy planning everything out on a creative project, are you willing to pursue your next creative project with less upfront exploration? (2)

Creative Experience

• When trying to convey large amounts of information to an unfamiliar audience, how are you using design to simplify the information and draw in audience members while letting the design fade into the background? (3)
• To anticipate a major creative experience impact, ask, “What’s going to stop (the audience) in its tracks and (make them) think about this completely differently?” (3)

Creative Inspiration for these Creative Ideas:

(1) “Bordellos for the Brain (Conference Mania)” by Holly Finn

(2) “In the Beginning,” by Ron Rash

(3) “Creating – At the Side of an Expert Exhibitionist” – Melanie Ide, Museum Planner

Next Week’s Creative Thinking Skills Assignment

I hope you enjoy working one of these creative ideas this week. While you’re at it, bookmark this page and come back to it next week to refresh even more creative thinking skills! - Mike Brown

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

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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Today’s Blogapalooza guest post is from Jessica James. Jessica has been working for one of the world’s larget casual dining restaurant chains since 2006. She is currently working on completing her master’s degree in journalism from The University of Kansas. We’re excited to share Jessica’s seven lessons for creative success – lessons that are a valuable guide to creating no matter the industry in which you work!

Creative Success – A 7 Lesson Guide to Creating by Jessica James

For 15 years, I have been in the business of creating new products and ideas. The first eight years were formative; learning my craft, sharpening my skills, networking, and building a reputation – finding my way in an all-consuming industry.  The last seven years have been innovative – a culmination of what I have learned, whom I’ve had the opportunity to know, and the creative success challenge that comes with maintaining relevance everyday.

From these innovative years, I have identified seven lessons for creative success that are my guide to creating.

1. Take Notes…and Use Them!

I use the Notes app on my iPhone everyday.  Perhaps I’m a bit OCD, but I have lists for everything.  Ideas for my house.  Ideas for upcoming projects.  Wines I need to try.  Places I need to go.  Anything that might be useful for inspiring creativity down the road gets logged into notes.

I read the notes a few times a week, usually at night when unwinding.  I use this time to focus on something that may have grabbed my attention earlier and think about how it might apply to things I’m working on now. This process is very helpful in balancing my decisiveness and impulsiveness with my desire to present researched and thought out ideas.

2. Read All the Time

This ties to the first creative success tip.  If you’re taking notes all the time and generating lists, chances are, you’re reading things that are interesting and relevant to your personal and professional life.

I try to read a mix of things– parenting magazines, fashion magazines, cooking magazines, trade journals, blogs, websites, social media outlets, news magazines, Twitter, and the occasional ‘trash magazine.’ A mix of information will keep your ideas fresh and give you a perspective and creative success you would not otherwise have.

3. Focus on the Fix

When creating things, it is inevitable people will challenge your products or ideas, valid or not.  Don’t minimize your creative critics.  Pay close attention to your critics and what they are saying.  Be discreet about it and you will stay ahead of them.

Think about how things might go wrong and focus on how you would fix them.  Do this all the time – not just when something is near completion.  Have the voice of your creative critics in your head and use it to fine-tune your work.

4. Stay Organized

I read once somewhere (affiliate link) that creative people tend to achieve their best creative success in environments described as organized chaos.  To the contrary, analytical left-brained people work best when things are tidy, organized and maintained.  I relate to this.  My desk at work has piles of things that haven’t moved in a month or so, but I could tell you the contents of every pile. It’s a mess, but it’s organized.

Keeping your ideas and projects in organized and accessible piles or files will help you prioritize and shift gears quickly from one project to the next if needed – something critical in today’s world of news updates by the minute.

5. Do Things You Hate to Do

This is nothing new.  You should do things that make you uncomfortable.  It helps to vary your perspective on your life and work.  It makes you stronger.  Most importantly, doing things you hate to do builds character and makes you more interesting.

I recently joined my undergraduate university’s alumni association.  I was not involved on campus at all when I was there.  I was a non-traditional student who lived off campus and attended classes a few nights a week for three years.  I joined the alumni association to feel more connected to the hundreds of dollars per month I am about to start paying back as a result of student loans that funded my private, Jesuit-school education.

I don’t really enjoy my time spent with the association.  The monthly commitment is always preceded by me trying to think of how I can get out of it. The people are nice; they are just nothing like me. They are Catholic, very connected to the university, know one another, and are all adverse to taking risks or creating conflict.  They are homogenous and tend to surround themselves with people just like them. Needless to say, this experience has given me a better understanding of how to interact with people comfortable with status quo.

6. Consult a Consulate

It didn’t take me long to realize my creative success was tied directly to the success of others and their willingness to aid me when I needed it.  The half a dozen or so people I rely on most are a motley crew of experts, inside and outside of my industry.

Being nimble and being able to rally others to help you make things happen is critical to the creative process.  I’m connected with lawyers, artists, tech-guys, photographers, producers, entrepreneurs, writers, police & firemen, and educators.  You never know who will spark an idea or make a connection to redirect your path to success.

7. Fail

Being creative comes with a lot of failure.  I generate over five hundred ideas every year; half of those might be shared with other people and only a dozen or so might come to fruition.

A lot of creative success comes with a lot of failure.  Don’t be afraid to fail; fear will only hold you back. Each time you fail, you should learn something.  Each failure should change your perspective.  Creative success is built on a foundation of failure.

And what does creative success look like?

What’s the theme that ties together this seven lesson guide to creating? Always remember that creative success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm!  - Jessica James

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The Brainzooming blog has a wonderful group of guest authors who regularly contribute their perspectives on strategy, creativity, and innovation. You can view guest author posts by clicking on the link below.

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