Strategic Thinking Exercises - Giving Away the Family Recipes

Our objective for the Brainzooming community visioning workshop at the Gigabit City Summit was sharing multiple strategic thinking exercises city delegations from around the United States could immediately use to further their strategic conversations on broadband initiatives.

The objective created a conundrum.

While I wanted Gigabit City Summit attendees to understand they could use the strategic thinking exercises right away within their Summit delegations, it's unrealistic to imply they could immediately create a successful large-scale collaborative visioning sessions based on a one-hour workshop.

Yet I didn't want Gigabit City Summit attendees to think we were giving them tools that ONLY worked if The Brainzooming Group were involved in implementation (which is the sense you get from so many workshop presenters).

Giving Away Our Family Recipes

Here's how I wound up explaining the situation.

I asked the workshop attendees, by a show of hands, to share how many like cooking for themselves.

Many hands went up.

I next asked how many liked cooking for small dinner parties, and then large formal dinners.

With each question, there were fewer hands.

Finally, I asked how many were confident and interested in applying their cooking talents in a large restaurant setting.

Only one or two of the more than one hundred participants raised their hands.

I then compared their cooking aspirations and the realistic outcomes from sharing our “recipes” for strategic thinking exercises with them.

They could readily and easily use the strategic thinking exercises themselves, with their city delegations, or even with small groups when they returned home. It would be unrealistic to think, however, that without a lot of experience and practice that they could invite fifty, one hundred, or several hundred community members and expect to have a flawless, productive visioning session.

That is where we come into the picture, helping make the smaller group experiences more productive and a large community visioning event even possible.

Strategic Thinking Exercises as Recipes

I share this story about recipes because it helps answer the question we get so often about why we share so many strategic thinking exercises here.

They’re all recipes, and we want you to use the recipes, try them out, adapt them to what you need to make happen in your organization. Starting small provides the opportunity to try selecting the right ones, combining them in intriguing ways, and learning from successes and mistakes.

If you need to be ready for a high-stakes event, however, we think you’ll want someone who has experience to make sure everything works.

And that’s where we’d love to work with you to ensure all the success you need when the stakes are high and the recipes HAVE to turn out perfectly the first time!

Could you use some of our best recipes for outside-in innovation?