The Brainzooming Group

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

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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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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

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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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.

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Working on developing a brand strategy for a client’s brand re-launch, we were brainstorming potential phrases for its brand promise and brand dimensions. We were starting with an extensive list of words we’d developed through a variety of brand-related strategic thinking exercises. While trying out word combinations to describe our client’s brand, we happened upon a new branding exercise.

Where Does Your Brand Live?

Here’s the scenario for this strategic thinking exercise:

Imagine your brand is relocating to an intersection in a new part of town where you get to select the names of the cross streets that will make up your brand address. With that freedom, what are the best names for the two streets where your brand lives?

As an example, we were at the seemingly ubiquitous Panera Bread for our meeting. You can imagine Panera Bread being located at the intersection of:

• Soups and Salads
• Meetings and Greetings
• Scones and Smoothies
• Drinks and Links (i.e., networking)
• Comfort Food and Uncomfortable Booths

Each of those intersections says something different about the Panera Brand brand – and that’s the point.

Don’t confine yourself to one set of cross streets. Imagine a whole variety of cross streets that could potentially be the current or, more importantly, the ideal address for your brand.

And once you have a long list of street name combinations, think about the possibilities relative to these questions:

• What others companies would be located near this intersection? Are they in your industry or other industries?
• What are the intersections where your competitors are located?
• How busy is your brand intersection?
• Is this intersection a prime location? Are property values around this intersection rising? Why or why not?
• Do people live in this area or do they just visit and leave?
• Why WOULD customers want to visit this intersection in this part of town?
• How likely is it that your intersection will, as other famous intersections have (think 12^th Street and Vine), be immortalized in a song?

The answers to all these questions should help you look at your brand and its strategic position relative to competitors and customers in a new and different way.

Strategic Thinking Exercises from the Brainzooming Lab

Most of the strategic thinking exercises we share have been well tested in client sessions.

This brand strategy exercise, however?

Well, we just came up with it last weekend! We’ll be trying this branding exercise out and welcome you to see how it works for you. If you take a shot at it, let us know how it works for helping clarify your new or existing brand strategy. - 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 2013 issue of Psychology Today includes an article on “The Enemies of Invention.”

It is a compilation article featuring five authors’ perspectives on factors standing in the way of creativity and innovation.

The article also includes creative ideas from each author on how to get around these impediments to creativity.

Creative Ideas for Defeating “Enemies of Invention”

Here are snapshots of each of the five authors’ perspectives, along with our Brainzooming point of view on these creative ideas:

1. The Danger of Starting in the Same Old Place by Art Markum

“Don’t think differently. Think about different things.” 

The point is when we start from the same frame of reference as the creative challenge we face, we come up with run-of-the-mill ideas. Instead, we have to begin by thinking about other things from different perspectives. Brainzooming Article: What’s It Like?

2. Fear of Failure Narrows Vision by Peter Gray

We “work best when we are playing, not when we are striving for praise as a reward.” 

To be creative, don’t be so serious so much! Have some fun and play! Brainzooming Article: Kids and Creativity

3. Concentration Is Creativity’s Killer by Sian Beilock

 ”Turning your attention to something that requires just a little bit of concentration is a better way to jump-start the creative process.” 

Don’t concentrate so much on the task at hand. To instigate your creative possibilities, free up space in your mind to let your creativity work. Brainzooming Article: Finding a Huge Task to Avoid

4. The Downside of Avoiding Imitation by Christopher J. Sprigman and Kal Raustiala

“In practice, creativity is a cumulative process, one that often involves tweaking, adapting, and melding existing creations.” 

As we say so often, borrow existing ideas and twist them into new creative ideas all your own. Brainzooming Article: Lessons in Borrowing Creative Ideas

5. Battling Boredom Thwarts Serendipity by Peter Bregman

“Wasted moments are ones in which we often unconsciously connect the dots.” 

Resist the temptation to fill your head and attention with stuff that gets in the way of creativity. You’ll be much better off if you pursue empty-headed creativity! Brainzooming Article: Perhaps not surprisingly, we don’t have an article on doing nothing as a way to spur creativity. We’ll have to get on that right away!  - Mike Brown

If these creative ideas for defeating enemies of invention intrigue you, check out the links below for each of these authors’ books (affiliate links):

                                                                                  (Affiliate Links to Books)

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

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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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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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I’ll readily admit I’m a proponent for borrowing creative inspiration. Not anything illegal or unethical, mind you. But borrowing creative inspiration in the sense of always being on the lookout for inspiration in everything you encounter. Unless you simply ooze creativity, this idea of borrowing creative inspiration is vital to having new ideas when you need them.

6 Areas for Borrowing Creative Inspiration

Here are six areas where I most frequently look for creative inspiration to borrow:

1. Design Layouts

I can do basic design (as evidenced by an advertising layout award in a long-ago state high school journalism contest), but it’s not my forte. If I need to design an ad flier or white paper, I comb through magazines looking for patterns and spatial relationships to mimic. In fact, the structure for our advertisement in The Social Media Monthly is based on the advertising my previous company did that was very effective.

2. Stock Photos

For the past couple of years, I’ve been using Photocase.com as our main source for stock photos after a Twitter-based recommendation from Sally Hogshead. While Photocase.com definitely has some intriguing and novel photos, its European roots leave it lacking for photos representing some particularly US-oriented images and idioms. As a result, I’ll sometimes use an image on Photocase that’s close, but misses the mark as inspiration to draw or photograph something on my own that more closely fits the need for a blog image.

3. Blog Titles

Magazine headlines, especially for self-help publications, are great inspiration for borrowing engaging headline structures for blog titles. Again, as with design, headlines are not my strongest suit, so any inspiration for catchy blog titles is beneficial.

4. Social Media Content Sharing Patterns

I’m always on the lookout to see how people who seem to know what they are doing are approaching social media content sharing. It’s particularly intriguing when they change how and when they are sharing social media content. I adapted our Twitter sharing pattern from a prominent social media specialist who was sharing content more regularly and frequently than I would have imagined. When I saw Brainzooming had developed a sizable global audience, it made sense to move to a 24/7 social media content sharing cycle on Twitter, with planned tweets every 60 minutes.

5. Speaking Styles and Patterns

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve mimicked how those around me speak. For whatever reason, if I’m around someone enough, I start picking up words, phrases, and speech patterns they use. As a result, when I hear speakers in person or repeatedly via recordings, I unconsciously pick up vocal mannerisms. These often pop up in presentations that I only catch when I listen to my own presentations later.

6. Creative Thinking Models

Whenever I read about or become exposed to a cool business strategy success story, I ask the question, “How could you get to that same result again?” This question is the basis for many of the creative thinking exercises The Brainzooming Group uses in our work. Whether or not a company actually used the questions or steps we envision is irrelevant. We try to create a solid, strategic structure that would plausibly lead an organization down the same successful path.

Where are you most frequently borrowing creative inspiration to boost creative thinking?

In what situations do you borrow creative inspiration? How have you incorporated borrowing into your creativity? And importantly, do you share your creative ideas in a way that others can borrow from them for their creative pursuits? – Mike Brown

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

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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