The Brainzooming Group

Here are 10 favorited creativity tweets from Twitter during the past week. If you’d like to see more, you can follow me on Twitter in a couple of places: @mikebrown or @brainzooming

@ExecVelocity Coaching DQ: What new elements can improve workplace creativity and what is holding you back from implementing them?

@douglasbrent: Authentic creativity generates ideas, not smoke and mirrors.

@Ekaterina_E “Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.” George Lois

@AW0LF The older you get, the more experienced you become. Experience inspires creativity and that’s the recipe for greatness.

@williamskim #Creativity – Frustration is as much a part of creativity as inhaling is to breathing.

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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Here’s a quick video from a recent trip back to Western Kansas.

It’s a reflection about how rules and boundaries get imposed, often without any real consideration of whether they help, hurt, or in fact do nothing but waste energy relative to what’s really important.

Go forth and think outside the lines!

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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To wrap up the week, here’s a link tweeted by Scott Frederick – an instructive scene from “The Office” if you’d like to see nearly all of the NOs standing in the way of innovation in just over 2 minutes!

Want to be more innovative? It’s simple – do nothing that Michael does. Doesn’t get much easier than that for a Friday!

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 Friday evening, I tweeted a request for potential blog topics. @DrStrik9 requested a post on innovation amid competing objectives or multiple bosses. It’s a situation that’s very realistic, and while it can be challenging, here are some steps to take:

• Understand the Political Fray – Make sure you have a strong read on the business culture and the political ins and outs of the business. That foundation is key to navigating successfully through varied perspectives.
• Stay Rooted in the Fundamental Question – “What are we trying to achieve?” Amid differing points of view, you want to be able to demonstrate that your actions and perspectives tie back to what’s right for the business.
• Actively Manage Relationships – Differing points of view suggest at least two parties involved. That means you’ll likely have to take on a mediator role to strengthen relationships among the contending parties.
• Identify Areas of Mutual Agreement among Apparently Conflicting Objectives – Find where even conflicting points of view share some commonality. If you can discern points of mutual agreement, you have a base from which to attempt to bring conflicting areas closer to alignment.
• Don’t Make Decisions in One-Off Conversations – If you’re working with contending authority figures, use one-on-one conversations (or emails) to ask questions, better understand points of view, and identify areas of potential compromise. Don’t use them as decision making opportunities. Doing so means you’ll wind up going back and forth negotiating decisions. Instead, push decision making to joint meetings where all parties are present. This may require strategic delays or bluffing, but you’ll be in a better position to manage a discussion toward getting decisions made (and sticking) when all parties are involved at the same time.

That’s a starting point for something that can certainly be stressful and difficult to do. It would be great to hear what any of you have done in similar situations – what’s worked and not worked for you?

Want more ideas? Go back and take a look at the “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” post, especially number 2 on “NO Direction” and number 7 on “NO Motivation to Innovate” for links to a few more approaches.

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’m at the Charlotte, NC Business Marketing Association Lunch today speaking on “Taking the NO Out of Business InNOvation.” If you’re on Twitter, check out the hashtag #ncBMAlunch to see if we get some live tweets going!

Talking about the same topic at last Thursday’s KU class prompted a question on how to challenge ideas without being seen as a naysayer. Here are 3 tips to avoid getting labeled as negative:

1. Don’t Telegraph Your Comments

People often begin a challenge by clearly signaling through their body language (confrontational), tone (frustrated or agitated), or words (but, don’t, can’t, instead, etc.) they’re about to challenge something. Here’s an alternative – stop doing those things! Think hopefully about the conversation, looking for points of agreement; this will help modify your body language and tone. Then simply start building on the other person’s idea, even modifying it, without allowing your words and attitude to suggest you disagree.

2. Conceal Your Sources

People are also often very sincere in saying where an idea comes from, even when it really doesn’t matter. This happens frequently with new hires who trot out ideas prefaced by, “Here’s what we did at my old company.” The typical reaction? “If your old company is so great, why aren’t you still there?” In contrast, introduce a potentially challenging idea without any attribution, foregoing even claiming your own ideas. By allowing an idea to be introduced on its own, you can start getting consideration for it without any negative baggage its original source may create.

3. Give Your Ideas Away

What might be viewed as a challenging point of view from you may be seen as completely innocuous when coming from someone else in the group. The key here is to be comfortable with sharing an idea with a receptive party, letting them build and modify the idea, and then confidently in allowing them to introduce the idea if it means a higher likelihood of successful adoption.

Try these three, and you’ll be a lot less likely to be seen as giving NO for an answer.

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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Speaking and travel are both great sources of inspiration for blog topics. Twitter has become another one as well. This week, we’ll feature posts inspired through each of these sources.

Brainzooming – Being Perceived as a Strategic Leader

Last Thursday I spoke at Max Utsler’s Innovation in Marketing Communications class at Kansas University, debuting the new version of “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” summarized here a number of weeks ago. It seemed very appropriate since the first version of the presentation came from speaking to Max’s class 5 years ago!

One topic we discussed was the idea of very subtle ways to demonstrate a strategic perspective. This includes taking notes and recapping meetings to allow you to shape the conversation as it happens and afterward. One student voiced the concern that taking and typing notes can get you cast in an “administrative” role. It’s a valid concern, yet one that’s easily avoided. Here’s how:

• Don’t just take notes – take on a facilitation role. That means being ready to interject open-ended, probing questions to help the group explore the topic being discussed. Your active questioning and involvement provides equal footing with other participants even while you’re displaying the characteristics of servant leadership.
• Don’t just type up the notes – add value through summarization, structure, conclusions, and recommendations. When someone approaches note taking and follow-up as an administrative task, the report out is typically chronological, with the notes coming back word-for-word, space-for-space as they were recorded at the meeting. When approaching a recap strategically, however, it provides the opportunity to move beyond a chronological playback. Instead, you can group notes based on similar themes, organize them with a logic flow that a live meeting doesn’t allow, fill-in information gaps, form conclusions, and even begin to suggest recommendations.

Employ these two approaches and meeting participants will notice the difference. You won’t be mistaken as playing an administrative role. Trust me – I’ve seen it work time after time.

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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Here’s a video site by Kutiman called ThruYou that mashes up unrelated YouTube clips into songs. It’s phenomenal. You have to check out the first song “The Mother of All Funk Chords.”

To me this is a definitive answer for people who say innovation has to be something new. It doesn’t! Innovation can be all about taking pieces and rearranging them in incredibly inventive ways!

Thanks to @40deuce for tweeting this.

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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