Since The Brainzooming Group launched, we have developed many strategic thinking exercises and models applying our methodology to diverse clients and business situations.
The result? We are further along and can even more easily customize these strategic thinking exercises to your needs if you face comparable situations. That is a major benefit if you want an outside, strategic perspective and need to start right now!
16 Strategic Thinking Exercises Ready to Go Right Now!
Review this list and identify the business opportunities or challenges that are incorporated in your strategic plans – or not. If any of these are on your agenda for this year, contact us. We can customize the strategic thinking exercises specifically for your organization and start moving even faster than normal!
We are trying to develop new strategies and strengthen our organization’s strategic perspective.
- Our people are spread across multiple locations. We can’t get them in one room at the same time, but we have to move ahead in developing this strategy right away.
- The sales team needs to take a new approach to business development. Our industrial sales force needs training to be stronger at strategic thinking and developing creative solutions.
- We have a big community group with a tremendous number of stakeholders. Our challenge is getting them to imagine and articulate their future needs. (The community could be a city or community, large nonprofit organization, or university.)
- We are a CPG company and need to move around big box retailers and online behemoths in disruptive ways. Our brand managers are smart, but they haven’t figured this out yet.
- We are in the process of making a big acquisition. We need to figure out what that means for our brand, the brand we’re acquiring, and how to best bring them together.
- We serve customers every day, but it’s inconsistent and we don’t get credit for the good things we do. How can we support and align our people to deliver more a consistent service experience?
- We’re having trouble hiring the talent we need. Our brand doesn’t have a strong perception among potential candidates, so we need to develop a more attractive employer branding strategy.
We know we need to use content marketing, but we’re struggling to connect the content to our brand and audience while generating real business returns.
- Our brand strategy statements are just some sayings on posters on walls. They don’t shape what we do or how we do it, and we realize that’s a problem.
- We have no idea how we can create the right types of content for the audiences we’re trying to attract to buy our products. We have brochures like crazy. What can we write about that they will create interest in them?
- When it comes to social media and content marketing, we know we’re still behind. Is there a quick, understandable method to figure out the best ways to accelerate what we’re doing and create a smart, ROI-focused strategy?
- Our organization has a customer event coming up, and we never do much with these events to increase our knowledge of them. Is there a way to get our customers to help us generate content that they will be interested in while we have them all together?
Our focus is on innovation, and we need to bring it to life and create results before we lose interest and move on to the next big strategy.
- Our innovation pipeline is dry, dry, dry. We think we have all the best ideas, but we struggle with innovating on new product development in our industrial market.
- We need bigger, bolder thinking than we seem capable of to battle these new types of competitors. We’re a premium product (with a price to go along) and are getting picked apart by brands that don’t deliver what we do.
- It would be great to invite a large group of customers to help identify their opportunities and challenges, weigh in on new product preferences that might address them, and imagine what more their favorite ideas should do. It sounds like a focus group, but it’s bigger. Is that possible to do?
- Our product team is creative, but they are tapped out right now. We need a way to re-energize their creative juices, while they learn some new creative techniques AND develop new product ideas at the same time. It’s a lot to ask, but we need this to stay ahead of the marketplace.
- We have a new product coming out this year, and we’re struggling with what to call it. We don’t want some cutesy name or something that sounds made up, and nobody has come up with the right idea yet.
Any of these opportunities and challenges familiar to you?
Are you under pressure to make one or more of these happen right now?
You owe it to yourself: contact us so we can talk through what you need to accomplish and see if it makes sense to work together.
We can get moving with the strategic thinking exercises and workshop implementation that will deliver results for you faster than you have ever imagined! – Mike Brown
