3 Strategy Exercise Pairings Delivering Intriguing Insights

Our Brainzooming website features hundreds of strategy exercises and questions. With the luxury of many approaches for exploring strategic opportunities, you can create unique exercise pairings. A single team (or multiple small groups) can consider topics from varied paths. Each path will produce different insights to aggregate and reveal additional learnings.

Strategic Exercise Pairings for You

Pairings

Here are three strategic exercise pairings. We find them all tremendously productive:

1. Mining Obvious and Hidden Risks

An obvious risks exercise builds a comprehensive list of known risks that a strategic plan must address. A hidden risk exercise prompts people to consider the near misses or “we’ve been lucky that hasn’t happen risks” that never seem to be top-of-mind.

2. Enhance and Extremeify Ideas

We use Enhancer exercises to help teams imagine multiple, varied ideas for specific situations. These are innovative ideas, yet they are generally focused and attainable. We pair enhancers with Extreme Creativity questions. These open big space for transformative ideas. Extreme creativity questions enable thinking about radical shifts in rules, constraints, permissions, and expectations. Putting incremental ideas through these bigger questions generates new breakthrough possibilities.

3. Prioritize Opportunities Two Ways

Need to narrow ideas? A prioritization grid is wonderful for quickly accomplishing the task. With two different prioritization grids (say, importance versus implementation ease and organizational readiness versus competitive response), you can unlock new insights. One experience doing this revealed that lower-ranked opportunities later appeared as significant risks and critical success factors. This meant they warranted greater attention than originally thought.

The Benefits in Combining Exercises

Employing strategic exercise pairings will generate new ways to: