The Brainzooming Group

What got me originally thinking about yesterday’s Brainzooming column on career training when school’s out for you was a client request. She wanted ideas for assessing her organization’s marketing performance. I delivered a diagnostic from the files used by a high-priced marketing support organization my former employer belonged to for several years.

I realized during my corporate life there were incredible learning resources readily available all around, although they didn’t necessarily look like learning resources. The exact moment I realized this was when we were investing a million dollars for a high-end consulting firm to help us create a strategic marketing plan. While many peers complained about all these Northwestern and Stanford MBAs trying to tell them what to do, I saw it as the company investing in helping us all become better strategic marketers.

Taking that view, I soaked up everything possible and even got them to bring in other resources to teach us including a guy whose only job was to help them think about how to logically structure presentations.

And yeah, I saved nearly everything and developed strategic thinking tools beyond what they provided. Many of those learning opportunities and resources (both excellent and crappy) were important early inspirations for creating our Brainzooming methodology.

16 Learning Resources for Everyday

If you take a similar, broad approach to the learning resources around you, I’m guessing you’ll find a lot of ways to keep learning and continually enhance your career training – even during times when typical training expenditures may be reduced.

Consider this list of 16 learning resources your employer may be dangling in front of you right now to improve your career training:

• Consultants and outside experts working on your business
• Training and lunch-and-learn programs
• Working on new initiatives for the company
• Time with internal mentors
• Actively participating and using resources from industry association memberships
• Reference materials available within the business
• Opportunities to create your own reference materials
• Observing and asking questions of smart people
• Documenting learnings from projects and other work you do
• Experimenting and trying new work approaches
• Subscriptions – whether online, print, or some other form
• Attending events and conferences
• Volunteering to speak on behalf of the company at conferences
• Business travel
• Exposure to new technology
• Becoming great friends with smart and experienced colleagues

As you can tell, these 16 learning resources take on different forms. And the list doesn’t even include all the free and low-cost resource available online.

Redefining Career Training and Learning Resources

The point is, consider defining your job, at least in one respect, as an ongoing career training opportunity. When you do, your eyes open to a whole variety of learning opportunities you might have previously ignored.

So coupled with yesterday column, are you ready to start planning your career training for next semester? You have all summer to do it! – 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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School’s out for the summer – or soon will be – for those who are in “school.”

For those of us officially out of school, however, is school ever out?

If we’re in the midst of a career, shouldn’t we be learning all the time?

The answers to these questions are “no” and “yes,” by the way.

How many of us though, unless our employer is doing it, approach career training formally – with a planned curriculum involving both traditional and non-traditional learning and grades reflecting our progress?

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t.

I have a long list of interests where I want to learn more. I read and experiment with those, maybe taking some classes or going to learning events. Mostly though, I read random articles or blog posts on these topics and stop. But devising a comprehensive learning plan? I gave that up when I walked out after completing Dr. Jauch’s business policy (affiliate link) final to wrap up grad school.

4-Step Career Training Plan to Learn More this Year

So how about this relatively simple 4-step plan to work on during the traditional summer vacation from school to make sure you are moving your career training ahead?

1. Pick Your Curriculum

Identify two topics where you want to improve your knowledge, skills, and proficiency. They may be directly work related or of a more personal interest. Either way, actually write down that you’re tackling them next fall (or right away, if you’re going for extra credit).

2. Select Your Learning Resources

Next, plan where and how you’re going to improve your expertise in these two areas in the near future. And “near future” doesn’t mean “whenever,” but during the next school semester. Start right now identifying several sources and activities in each area that will grow and test your mastery and progress.

3. Decide Your Class and Study Schedule

3. Once you know what you’re studying and have a general sense of your available learning resources, create your schedule for next semester. Look ahead on your calendar and actually start blocking out one or two learning times or activities you’ll regularly do next semester. Do it now before your calendar fills up with all the other things that pop up and eliminate time you’d like to devote to learning. While your schedule may fluctuate and vary the closer you get, plan for a start and an end – and don’t “cut classes” lightly.

4. Get Ready to Grade Yourself

Finally, as you go through the semester, grade yourself. You get to do it yourself because we’re all big girls and boys. But don’t use a pass / fail scale. Here’s a suggestion:

• A – Clearly demonstrating new levels of proficiency and expertise that’s translating into better results and/or other people recognizing new value you provide
• B – Seeing stronger knowledge and comfort on the topic, but it hasn’t translated into any noticeable differences yet in results / value
• C – You have more knowledge, but there is still much to learn to apply your knowledge as you hoped

Notice there are no D’s or F’s. That’s because if you’ve gotten this far in being more deliberate about learning, you’re ahead of all the other people you work with, whether inside or outside your company, who aren’t trying this!

Are you ready for better career training?

Are you up for going back to school next semester in a more structured way to boost your career training? If so, what topics are you going to study? – 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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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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A Twitter friend tweeted something the other day about performing a SWOOT analysis. Thinking there may be a new type of strategic thinking exercise I need to check out, I clicked the link.

As I had already suspected, the SWOOT analysis was just a typo in the tweet. The article was really about doing a SWOT analysis: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats.

Same old SWOT stuff after all, but the Twitter typo got me thinking.

7 Ideas to Turn a SWOT Analysis into a SWOOT Analysis

If there were a SWOOT analysis, what would that other O stand for? What new O word would add new depth, clarity, or insight into the standard SWOT analysis to enhance the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats you’ve uncovered from the classic strategic thinking exercise?

Here are seven O’s to consider tucking into the middle of your next SWOT analysis (along with related strategic thinking questions) to add a new dimension:

1. Objectives – From the strengths and weaknesses already identified, what are the most important and/or challenging goals?
2. Occurrences – What events took place during the period you’re evaluating to shape future opportunities and threats?
3. Obsolescence – What things or ideas are no longer relevant now as you explore your future situation?
4. Opinions – What are the most strongly held opinions relative to the analysis, and which of them are fact-based opinions?
5. Ordinary – What things are so common that they’ve become part of the backdrop but could emerge as big positive or negative issues?
6. Objections - Amid the analysis of the current and future situation, what are the most serious objections to conclusions from the analysis?
7. Organization – Where is the organization ready or not ready to capitalize on the opportunities and threats it will face?

I’m not sure a SWOOT analysis could or even should replace a typical SWOT analysis, but when a strategic thinking exercise is used frequently and becomes so common, it’s always worthwhile to inject something different to trigger new thinking.

That’s true even when the new strategic thinking exercise is prompted by a typo in a tweet! - 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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Woody Bendle is back with another creative thinking exercise for keeping your best in class products and capabilities truly best in class now and in the future by thinking through how you may really be limited or competitors may be able to attack you. Here’s Woody:

“Out there in some garage is an entrepreneur who’s forging a bullet with your company’s name on it. You’ve got one option now – to shoot first.”  Gary Hamel

Innovation is an interesting phenomenon.  Nearly all businesses exist because at one point or another, they identified an opportunity to create and deliver new value to the market.  Whether through a new best in class product or service, entrepreneurs often see unique ways to exploit the vulnerabilities of incumbent firms and as a result, start a new innovative business.  However, as the business grows it often puts in place highly efficient, and often inflexible, innovation-killing processes and standards in order to minimize costs and maximize profits.

I’ve always found this incredibly ironic!  The very thing that helped to create this successful business in the first place (innovation) becomes more and more difficult the larger and more successful the business gets.   And this is the point that Gary Hamel is making with his quote above; you cannot ever stop innovating.  Because once you do, someone is going to eat your lunch – that is an economic certainty!

One of the challenges for companies (in particular businesses in Western cultures) is the notion of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”   Even today with Lean and Six Sigma becoming more and more a corporate norm, Western societies and business still feel that setting out to improve something is a de facto admission that something is broken or wrong.  Get over yourselves already, would you?

In today’s markets, if you’re not improving, you’re going out of business – you just might not know it yet.

In order to be successful in today’s, and tomorrow’s market, you have to have the mindset of an innovator and you have to continuously innovate. The era of being able to rest on yesterday’s successes is long gone!

Internal improvements can be innovations!

Over the past 30 years or so, the team from Doblin Innovation Consultants has identified ten types of innovation that they classify into one of three categories:

1. Configuration
2. Offering
3. Experience

Source: Doblin Innovation Consultants

Internally oriented innovations, such as how you choose to align and deploy your resources and how you develop and implement unique processes, can regularly provide incredible value for your firm’s shareholders and customers.  These are often stealth innovations your competition can never replicate – even if they do eventually find out what it is that you are doing.  And, if you’ve adopted the mindset of continuous innovation and continuous improvement, you will have developed and implemented new best in class practices by the time your competition has replicated your old best practices.

Convinced already?  All right!  Let’s get to work!

Creative Thinking Exercise for Creating Best in Class

A valuable creative thinking exercise I’ve developed and used with repeated success over the years is one I call “Best In Class.” This exercise is useful for developing ideas for all types of innovations, but I’ve found it particularly valuable for inward facing Structure and Process innovations.

The idea behind the Best In Class creative thinking exercise is to identify and explore the things your organization is currently doing that would be considered best in class; and then develop ideas for making them even better – or even coming up with new ones.  This exercise has the following six steps:

1)     List all of the things your organization is doing that are best in class.

• These should be things where you are without peer in your category?

2)     List the all of the reasons why each is best in class

• What is truly unique about each one?
• How does it provide you a competitive advantage?
• How does it create unique value for your customers?

3)     List all of the reasons why each thing might actually be limiting for your business

• Is this preventing you from doing something else that might create more value?

4)     Come up with ways that a competitor might make each irrelevant or ineffective

• How easy would it be for someone to also do this and take your advantage away?
• Is someone already doing something to try and take this advantage away from your organization?  And if so, how?

5)     List things you would do if (for whatever reason) suddenly you were no longer allowed or able to do the thing for which you are best

6)     Considering all of the points identified in steps 2-5, how might this Best In Class item be made even better?

The idea with this exercise (as is typically the case with most creative thinking exercises) is to really push yourself and identify as many things as you can where your organization is Best In Class.  And for each thing you identify, list as many things as you can within each step.  The first things you come up with will be the easiest for you to complete.  Eventually, you will feel as if you are running out of ideas; but don’t stop here.  I have found over the years the best ideas and opportunities are amongst the last ones that you will generate.

So what do you think? Is this a creative thinking exercise you can see adding to your creativity toolbox?  Let me know!

And if you are feeling particularly ambitious, try doing this exercise as if you are that “up and coming” new disruptive competitor in your market.  I promise this will be enlightening!

Now let’s get innovating! - Woody Bendle

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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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Expectations are great when they help you think about what you want to accomplish. Expectations can also help you envision opportunities and problems you could face before they actually develop.

Expectations can also force you, however, to do things that aren’t good for you or even relevant to what you’re trying to make happen.

When expectations keep you clinging to the same old ideas or stuck in the same old ways, you have to do something to deal with them. We have a creative thinking exercise that can help.

A Creative Thinking Exercise to Try

Here’s a creative thinking exercise for when expectations are boxing you in and stopping you from accomplishing new successes:

1. List all the expectations you or others have about a situation that is screaming for change. You may want to note whether each expectation belongs to you or someone else.

2. Imagine throwing out each expectation one by one and asking as each is eliminated, “What would I do or not do now WITHOUT this expectation in place?”

3. When you’re all done, ask yourself, “Which of these expectations am I now willing to quit recognizing?”

Can you use this creative thinking exercise to be more effective?

No expectations on my part about you using this creative thinking exercise, but I think you’ll be more creative and happier if you do use it…frequently. – 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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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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