The Brainzooming Group

I was the guest on Wise Talk, a long-running teleconference series hosted by Sue Bethanis, the CEO/Founder of Mariposa Leadership. It was a fun conversation and quite enjoyable to answer questions from the Wise Talk listening audience too.

You can click here to listen to Wise Talk episode 99 on Strategy and Creative Thinking.

We explored, among multiple topics, borrowing creative ideas, structures, and strategic approaches from other areas and applying them to what you do. We talked primarily about the What’s It Like exercise we use, and Sue asked about what else we do to help people get comfortable with borrowing ideas, especially when that involves looking at analogous situations to their own.

Since any great question deserves a blog response, Sue’s question was an opportunity to bring together creative thinking exercises filled with more than 50 ideas on borrowing creative ideas – in ethical, productive, and beneficial ways.

Creative Thinking Exercises for Borrowing Creative Ideas

New, Innovative Ideas – Strategy Planning with What’s It Like – The What’s It Like creative thinking exercise is a go-to one to mine analogous strategic models for new creative ideas.

25 Ways to Change Your Character – Change Your Character is a creative thinking exercise to help you borrow ideas from a whole variety of people with different perspectives than you have while dealing with comparable situations.

Readin’ Where They Ain’t – Another way to stay on top of borrowing ideas is to immerse yourself in situations dissimilar to your own while looking for strategic connections.

Steal this Idea! – I stole this creative thinking exercise (no surprise I guess), and it’s a great way to involve an entire team in actively looking for and borrowing creative ideas.

Borrowing Creative Inspiration – 6 Areas to Boost Creative Thinking – It’s beneficial to borrow familiar structures that lend themselves to creative thinking. You can then generate new creative ideas by running your own perspective through these structures.

Borrowing Ideas and Adapting Them

7 Ways to Borrow Creative Ideas with a Clear Conscience - In answer to a question from an audience member about how you ethically borrow creative ideas, this post highlights how to turn inspiration from others into your own ideas.

1 Great Way to Be More Creative Each Day – We borrowed the Trait Transformation creative thinking exercise from Chuck Dymer a long time ago, and repackage it here as a way to easily transform others’ ideas in dramatically different ways to best suit your needs.

Be More Derivative, Creative, and Fun – Katy Perry showed up at an awards show with a completely derivative dress heralded as something new. We turned Katy Perry and her dress into a creative thinking exercise that lets you make the same derivative-to-creative switcheroo.

Reinterpreting Creative Inspiration – 7 Lessons to Borrow Creative Ideas – A performer channeling Judy Garland onstage shared ideas for how she reinterpreted a very well-known person to make her portrayal familiar yet distinct to her performance style.

Making It Clear When Someone Borrows Your Creative Idea

Ideaprints – 9 Signals Your Brain Was All Over a Creative Idea – It can be fun when someone else borrows YOUR creativity and tries to make it THEIR own. Just in case, you can put your ideaprints on your creative ideas to make it more difficult for someone to borrow from you and claim your ideas as their own.  – 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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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

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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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Event marketing can be part of the brand building strategy for an organization of any size. While the size and scale of an event will vary based your organization’s objectives, if you’re investing in event marketing, you want it to support your strategy and work as hard for you as possible.

12 Articles on Event Marketing and Developing Memorable Audience Experiences

These twelve event marketing articles from the Brainzooming blog archive provide a strong starting point for moving an idea for an event marketing effort into a solid brand building strategy.

Creating Memorable Audience Experiences

A three part formula for designing and creating memorable audience experiences through event marketing.

Making Every Occasion an Event

An approach to making every gathering an event to maximize the impact with your audience. Whenever multiple people come together, take the time to make it special.

A Checklist for Integrated Program Planning Success

While not specifically event-related, the steps you’ll want to take to integrate your event with other activities in your organization are all here.

Sponsorship Strategy – Attention, Strong ROI, and a Non-Traditional Strategy

An overview of the strategy The Brainzooming Group used to create and roll-out a non-traditional sponsorship strategy related to the Google Fiber implementation in Kansas City. It’s a formula other organizations can use successfully for event marketing .

Free Speech? Try a “Fair Trade” Speech Strategy Instead

Speakers can be a big cost item in event marketing programs. It’s smart to invest in speakers who can deliver compelling content to create memorable audience experiences. If the budget it tight, however, here are ways to create real value to help attract strong speakers with fewer dollars.

Project Management Techniques – 6 Project Manager Mistakes to Not Repeat

Again, this isn’t exclusive to events, but many of the situations behind these project management lessons were born out of producing big corporate event programs.

Fireworks Displays-10 Event Secrets for Fourth of July Excitement

You can take a variety of event planning cues from a fireworks display to apply to your event.

An Innovative Business Conference Audience Experience – 7 Vital Elements

If you’re going to promote your conference as innovative, you had better incorporate these seven elements.

Capturing Big Ideas and Strategic Connections: Big Ideas in Higher Education Conference

This is a great companion to the previous article on creating an innovative business conference. The Big Ideas in Higher Education Conference was the height of a new type of event.

Create Lasting Memories in Online Events – 10 Ways to Do It

Ten specific ideas for creating memorability specific to online events.

Customize a Customer Brand Experience Very Simply

Customizing a customer brand experience doesn’t have to high tech. You can do it by knowing your audience along with a piece of paper.

Kansas City Marketing Communications and Social Media Panel Take-Aways

When you’re doing event marketing, build your strategy around how to make peoples’ dreams come true through a unique event. - Mike Brown

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Download the free ebook, “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” to help you generate fantastic new ideas! For an organizational creativity 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 innovation 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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To wrap up World Creativity and Innovation Week, here are ten of the most popular Brainzooming posts since last year’s celebration related to creativity. The ten article represent a good overview of our creativity content, including posts on strategic thinking questions, creative ideas, creativity tips, and creative thinking exercises:

1. Creating Cool Product Names for a New Product Idea – 8 Creative Thinking Questions

2. Extreme Creative Ideas – 50 Lessons to Improve Creativity Dramatically

3. Storytelling & Creative Process Tips from the 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012

4. Creative Thinking Ideas from the 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012

5. Cool Product Names – 17 Creative Questions for Winning Product Name Ideas

6. Strategic Thinking – Exercises and Tools for Creative Thinking and Strategy

7. How to Be More Creative? 3 Ways to Boost Creative Confidence

8. Creativity In Mobile Game Design by Hillary Hopper

9. Creative Strategy Lessons from the 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012

10. Creative Thinking Exercise – SCAMPER around KC by Woody Bendle

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 improve your creative thinking skills and generate fantastic ideas! To boost your organization’s innovation success, contact TheBrainzooming Group to help you rapidly expand strategic options and create strong implementation plans. Email us atinfo@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we’ll 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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Yesterday’s post explored sixteen signals to identify when strategizing becomes procrastination, stopping you from moving forward with implementation. At the heart of many of the sixteen signals is apprehension with decision making for various reasons.

In light of the challenges we all (okay, maybe most of us) face at times with making decisions on a timely basis, here is a recap list of Brainzooming articles on making successful decisions.

Decision Making Techniques

1. Don’t Overthink It? 5 Key Questions for Quick Decisions

Here are five ways to constrain thinking when it’s too easy to take more time to make decisions. Chopping off some available time, resources, and possibilities can get you to a decision much faster.

2. Making Decision Making Easier – She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not

One factor that can slow decision making speed is too many available choices. Here is a low-tech, very direct way to narrow your decision options and move directly toward decision making.

3. Strategic Thinking Exercise – Simply Making Big Decisions

Your approach for making big decisions doesn’t have to be overly complicated. It can be as simple as listing your criteria and asking yes or no questions about the options you’re considering.

4. Black and White Decision Making? Today, Change to Grey (and Vice Versa)

There are benefits to consciously changing your typical decision making style, even if temporarily.

5. Project Management – 15 Techniques When Time Is Running Down

I enjoy events because they have a built-in deadline: at some point, the event will start, and all decisions are either made or you’ve lost the chance to tinker any longer. When looking at all deadlines as “events,” these techniques help focus and move forward when time is running down.

Decision Making with Teams

6. Level 5 Decisions – Decision Making without Your Influence

Maybe part of your decision making challenge is you are trying to make too many decisions yourself. This helpful strategic thinking approach helps move decisions away from you toward your team so everyone can be more effective.

7. Striving for Simple Revolutionary Ideas

This prioritization and decision making approach not only helps identify winning ideas, it takes best advantage of using both individuals and groups working through a group decision making process efficiently.

Prioritization

8. Built for Discomfort – An Alternative Prioritization Strategy for Innovation

If the easy decision is always the decision that gets made, this prioritization strategy will help force a group to more strongly consider uncomfortable ideas that can be more challenging but also more beneficial.

9. Prioritizing Things Others Are Depending Upon

When you’re in a team situation, delaying a decision or action can really screw things up for the next person in the process. This alternative prioritization approach places a premium on taking actions that set the next person up for success.

Dealing with Varied Decision Making Situations

10. Making a Decision – 7 Situations Begging for Quick Decisions

It can be easy to lose sight of the bigger picture and turn small decisions into protracted ones. This guide adds some perspective to seven common decision making situations that could be quick decisions once you strip away everything that’s surrounding them.

11. Market Research – 5 Ways to Not Screw Up Focus Group Decision Making

As a market researcher, I’m quick to support the idea of getting market input to help make better decisions. If you misuse market research as a way to tap market input, however, you can make the situation worse. Here’s how to not screw up focus groups if you’re using them.

12. Is Your Brand Headed for Trouble? 5 Strategic Warning Signs

While decision making isn’t the central focus of this article, poor decision making is at the  heart of these strategic warning signs that suggest a brand is heading for trouble, if it’s not already present and accounted for in Troubleville. – 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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What to blog about and how to do it is a frequent search bringing people to the Brainzooming blog. This demand for ideas relative to blogging has prompted a considerable amount of blog-oriented content the past 18 months.

That much content on a particular topic always prompts requests for a post that pulls together and organizes the content in one place.

Since I’m conducting a blogging workshop on creating fantastic content for a business blog, we’re meeting two needs in one in this post with a compilation of blogging content that also serves as a primer for participants in the content class.

There are nearly forty articles organized, but if you feel as if you’re still struggling with how blogging can support your business strategy and where to get started, email (info@brainzooming.com) or call us (816-509-5320). We’ll get your business-producing social media effort going in a smart, successful direction.

Deciding to Have a Blog and Objective Setting

• Top 10 Reasons Your Organization Doesn’t Need a Blog . . . Today – It’s a trick headline. Your business does need a blog, starting now.
• “The 6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track” – Before starting your blog, download this free Brainzooming overview on how you should think about metrics and the impact a blog can have on your business.
• Blogging – 10 Permissions for Freelance and Small Business People – Trust us. If you’ve been hesitating on starting a blog for your small business for a bunch of lame reasons you’ve blown out of proportion, read this right now.

Developing Your Content Marketing and Brand Personality

• Creating Intriguing Social Media Content – 3 Fundamental Steps  - It’s not hard to create compelling content.
• A Strategic Creative Brief – 4 Benefits for Your Communications Efforts – You’ll have a stronger more sustainable blog if you begin with a strong idea of where you’re headed and who you’re targeting with your blog.
• Outside-In Blogging Strategy – Creating Robust Social Media Topics – Look outside your organization for what to blog about and identifying regular content becomes much easier.
• Social Media Content Personality Audit – Is Your Brand Personality There? – Simply because you are blogging for business doesn’t mean your personality needn’t show through in your content. No personality translates to no reason for readers to seek out your content.

Creating a Regular Blogging Schedule and Editorial Calendar

• Deciding Whether to Ditch Your Blogging Schedule – What Do You Want to Achieve? – How often you blog comes down to your business objectives, not whether you are inspired to write.
• Our Daily Blog Strategy – 5 Reasons The Brainzooming Blog Won’t Ditch It – Here’s why a high-frequency blog has made sense for us targeting a B2B market. And there are even more reasons since this post originally appeared.
• An Editorial Calendar: An Age-Old Collaborative Work – Creating an editorial calendar helps you stay better on track and publishing your blog regularly.
• Content Marketing – Space It Out Over Time – Manage your content, your time, and the expectations you place on your audience.

What to Blog About

• Social Media Content Ideation: Think – Know – Do – A tremendously efficient way to generate hundreds of content marketing  ideas.
• What to Blog About? 187 Ideas and Topics for Blogs, All in One Place – Our biggest list of links to specific blog topic ideas for business-oriented blogging.
• What to Blog About – 10 Ideas for Blogging through the New Year – There are specific topics you can blog about near the end of year when many blogs halt content creation and take advantage of readers looking for end of year information.
• Social Networking, Personal Relationships & 7 Content Strategy Questions – For business owners considering social media, there can be concerns about how much they reveal about themselves. This post contains advice and help to work through those concerns.

Structuring Your Blog Posts

• In Praise of Short Blog Posts – Blog posts don’t have to be 1,500 words. Write shorter to save time and trouble – for you and your readers.
• List Posts – 2 Tips for Creating More Popular Blog Posts – List posts work, plain and simple. Some list posts are long; some list posts are short. This gives you a rationale for when you should use which.

Blogging for B2B and Larger Companies

• A Collaborative Business Blog: Handling Senior Management Concerns – When the idea of blogging has to be sold to others, you may have some challenges. Here are some ways to counter typical concerns.
• Blog Topic Ideas – Social Media Content Strategy for a Large B2B Company – While these content marketing ideas apply to any business, larger B2B companies have tremendous content creation opportunities, if they take advantage of them.
• Social Media Policy – Whats and Whens Behind Your Guidelines – Questions to help you think through issues to consider in customizing your social media policy.
• Social Media Mistakes You Shouldn’t Be Making in Business-to-Business - Based on real-life examples, these are easy to correct social media mistakes business-to-business companies may be making.

Making the Most of Your Blogging and Social Media Time

• Social Media Productivity – 13 Tips to Maximize Your Time – Make all your content work as hard for you as possible in multiple venues.
• 15 Ideas to Make Your DIY Social Media More Successful – If you have few people and a lot to do on social media, these ideas will help maximize your effort.
• 20 Strategies for Making Your Solo Social Media Effort More Successful – 20 more ideas to get the greatest impact from an efficient implementation.
• Search Engine Optimization Strategy – Getting Smart on the Essentials – An available resource to get started on understanding search engine optimization to improve your blog traffic.

Getting Your Blog Content Seen

• Social Media – 5 Tips to Sharing an Evergreen Blog Post – Once a blog post is written, take advantage of every opportunity to use the content repeatedly in appropriate situations.
• SEO and Keyword Research Tool Use – 3 Blog Traffic Growth Ideas – Tools to help you become a better search engine optimization writer while you write.
• Content Curation – 5 Strategies from Celebrity Entertainment News Shows – Look to cheesy entertainment news shows for ideas you can incorporate into your social media sharing strategy.

Blogging Tips and Tricks

• What to Blog About and How – 25 Blogging Lessons from 5 Years and Social Media Content – Lessons in Creating Fantastic Content – Recaps of lessons learned from years of daily blogging.
• Blogging Success – 18 Blogging Ideas You Haven’t Read on Brainzooming – Ideas we haven’t pursued for the Brainzooming blog gleaned from a prominent blogger’s webinar on social media strategy.
• Reduce, Reuse, Recycle – 9 Ways to Green Your Blog – 9 tips to get more mileage from your social media effort.
• What to Blog About – 3 Ways Blogging Generates More Blog Posts – Once you get started blogging, it gets easier . . . most of the time!
• Social Media Content – 7 Ways to Repurpose What You’ve Written – More ideas on using what you’ve created over and over and over again. Then repeating.

Getting Help for Your Social Media Effort

• 3 Must-Haves for Driving Social Media – Just being young and having a Facebook page doesn’t mean someone is adept at social media. Look for these three characteristics in your social media team.
• Need a “Repair Your Blog” Tip? – 9 Ideas from Restaurant Impossible – When your blog needs a fix, here are nine ideas to consider when putting together your repair plan.

• Resuscitating a Near-Death Blog - Five steps to getting a floundering blogging effort back on its feet.

• Social Media Expertise – Why Wouldn’t You Demand It? – If someone is trying to sell you social media services, but they don’t seem to engage in social media for their own business, you need to ask some hard questions.
• Who Is Creating Social Media Content in Your Organization? – Depending on what you want from your content marketing, you may have to settle or enlist various people within your organization to participate.

Mike Brown

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If you’re struggling with determining ROI and evaluating its impacts, download “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track” today!  This article provides a concise, strategic view of the numbers and stories that matter in shaping, implementing, and evaluating your strategy. You’ll learn lessons about when to address measurement strategy, identifying overlooked ROI opportunities, and creating a 6-metric dashboard. Download Your Free Copy of “6 Social Media Metrics You Must Track!”

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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