BrainZooming

JULY 24, 2017

That’s when having the strategic thinking skills to extract the great ideas from everything else is so vital to them seeing the light of day and getting the consideration they deserve. 9 Strategic Thinking Skills to Create Clarity for Great Ideas. Thinking about some of the strategic thinking skills involved in that task, here is a handy checklist you can use with yourself and others to see how adept you (or they) are at surfacing great ideas.

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Strategic Thinking eBook Analysis Exercises 81

BrainZooming

FEBRUARY 15, 2017

You and others on your senior management team are beginning to see that strategic reality. How, if you are facing this situation, can you initiate a conversation with strategic thinking questions safe enough to raise the issue? 5 Strategic Thinking Questions to Start Reimagining the Organization. Using today as a starting point, reimagine specific strategic aspects, one at a time, to initiate the conversation. Stimulate fresh thinking.

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Strategic Thinking eBook Exercises Analysis 89

BrainZooming

JULY 18, 2017

5 Strategic Thinking Questions to Answer Before Making a Decision. Here are five strategic thinking questions you should identify well before you are on the verge of making a decision: Who owns making the decision? If you answer those strategic thinking questions early, your decision making will likely be more simple, clear, and streamlined. 9 ideas for introducing your strategic plan with style and impact to engage your organization.

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Strategic Thinking eBook Tips Data 72

BrainZooming

APRIL 19, 2017

One way to look at your branding strategy to identify new value opportunities is to ask this strategic thinking question: What mistakes are customers prone to make before and after they work with us, and how can we eliminate (maybe even guarantee to eliminate) any of those mistakes? Think about this opportunity if you’re a vehicle graphics company. Spend fifteen minutes today thinking about the dumb mistakes that happen before and after what you do.

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Strategic Thinking Strategy Strategy eBook 69

BrainZooming

APRIL 12, 2017

My dad was a huge believer in The Power of Positive Thinking. I think that book, by Norman Vincent Peale (affiliate link) was the first self-help book he tried to get me to read. For some reason, I particularly resisted The Power of Positive Thinking , although I’m hard pressed to say why. For whatever reason, though, I do not think I ever read the book in its entirety. The Power of Positive Thinking Plus Strategic Thinking Questions.

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Strategic Thinking eBook Strategy Strategy 56

BrainZooming

JANUARY 11, 2017

I jotted down the questions since I saw them as a strong strategic thinking exercise. A Strategic Thinking Exercise for Determining Trustworthiness. Applying this Strategic Thinking Exercise Broadly. This is a great example of a simple strategic thinking exercise to speed and sharpen decision making. What’s even better about these four strategic thinking questions?

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Strategic Thinking Exercises eBook Analysis 40

BrainZooming

JANUARY 16, 2018

Before an impending purge of The Wall Street Journal back issues in my office, I reviewed an article from a late December 2017 issue: The New Age of Bespoke Travel. The article inspired a laundry list of strategic thinking exercise prompts to re-imagine a threatened business model when your service offering is under assault from online offerings, bots, or some other form of complete automation. A New Strategic Thinking Exercise.

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Strategic Thinking Exercises eBook Analysis 81

BrainZooming

APRIL 7, 2017

Articulating Your Strategic Innovation Direction in an Understandable Way. Strategic Thinking Questions to Identify What Matters for a Brand. Workplace Diversity – The Why, Who, and How of Strategic Thinking. Strategic Thinking Success – 3 Critical Thinking Perspectives. Strategic Thinking Perspectives – Three Strategic Voices to Include on Your Team. Creative Thinking – The Math of Brainstorming and New Ideas. #3

Strategy 151

Strategy Strategy Culture Agile 151

BrainZooming

FEBRUARY 24, 2017

We have released a host of eBooks on strategic planning exercises and ideas to increase collaboration, creative thinking, alignment, and successful implementation. In case you missed any Brainzooming strategy planning eBooks, here are seven to jump start your strategic planning exercises and better engage your team in shaping your organization’s direction. Results – Creating Strategic Impact (Download). 11 Fun Ideas for Strategic Planning (Download).

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Exercises Tools Strategic Thinking Analysis 94

BrainZooming

JUNE 22, 2017

How can you get the most mileage from the free strategic planning eBooks we regularly offer as downloads? We do not pretend to be able to imagine EVERY single situation where you might apply our strategic thinking exercises. Yet when we create new eBooks, our main goal is ensuring the content is heavy on ideas and tools you can apply to improve strategic thinking and implementation in your organization. Using Our Own Strategic Planning Exercises.

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Exercises eBook Disruption Strategic Thinking 76

BrainZooming

MAY 1, 2017

Emma Gibson forwarded an article from Harvard Business Review addressing four factors that distinguish top chief executive performers in creating strategic impact. 4 Critical Factors for Successful Executives in Creating Strategic Impact. The four characteristics relate to quick decision making, engaging employees, anticipating forward-looking change, and delivering consistent performance. Strategic Thinking Exercise – Simply Making Big Decisions.

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Exercises eBook Strategy Strategy 87

BrainZooming

NOVEMBER 13, 2017

We were working with an organization on its future vision while facilitating its strategic planning process. As we worked on strategic thinking exercises to explore the company’s future vision and user experience, the change management strategy vocabulary the group used was conventional, unemotional, and lacking innovative thinking. In the exercise, the group cut words and images from magazines to express their depictions of various strategic concepts.

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Change Strategy Strategy Exercises 93

BrainZooming

NOVEMBER 17, 2017

Emma Alvarez Gibson and I were talking about identifying strategic themes within tens or hundreds of ideas from a strategic planning workshop or from thousands of comments within a survey. Other than a big dose of help from outside forces , what are dependable ways to identify meaningful strategic themes? As we chatted, I perused the Brainzooming website looking for articles on how we surface strategic themes. 10 Cues to Identify Strategic Themes among Ideas.

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eBook Guidelines Exercises Survey 81

Paul Hobcraft

JUNE 27, 2017

Yet how often do we fail to connect the innovation’s we design and execute specifically aligned to the strategic need? A good strategy, well outlined should encourage innovation and gain engagement but it can equally determine how we break down our imposed boundaries by its strategic intent, to encourage exploring and extending on what we know into the what we need to know. Strategic intent informs innovation.

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Strategy Strategy Innovation Design 186

BrainZooming

JUNE 29, 2017

Someone downloaded a free Brainzooming strategy eBook, noting his biggest strategy challenge is “how to do a strategic planning process when you are new.” ” That question relates to something we do all the time: walk into a new client in an unfamiliar industry to design and facilitate a strategic planning process. What you see as strategic may not be what others think is strategic. Getting to What Is Strategic.

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Resources Comparison eBook Brainstorming 86

BrainZooming

APRIL 10, 2017

Suppose the strategic planning task at hand is imagining what your organization will look like at some future point. What are strategic planning exercises you can use with a team? Employ extreme creativity and disruptive innovation-oriented questions to push your strategic planning vision exercise in bold, future directions. After securing individual responses, use a group strategic conversation to settle on the future strategic planning vision.

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Exercises eBook Trends Tips 91

BrainZooming

DECEMBER 12, 2017

Each of the four roles were intended to help push the group’s thinking on its customer experience strategy in varied ways. 4 Roles to Push Bold Customer Experience Strategy Thinking. We provided strategic thinking questions of their own to use, including: “That’s great and how can we do that _?” Questioners of What We Think (to challenge the status quo ). That’s the problem of me never having taken one of Chuck’s Six Thinking Hats workshops.

Strategy 79

Strategy Strategy eBook Groups 79

BrainZooming

AUGUST 29, 2017

Step 1: Select 10 to 15 very successful engagements. Also, select 10 to 15 unsuccessful (or less successful) engagements. What talents, perspectives, energy, engagement, and activities did each person and group contribute to the process? too much oversight or not enough engagement)? comparable engagements)? Rapidly deploy effective strategic thinking exercises to spur innovation.

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Strategy Strategy eBook Exercises 74

BrainZooming

SEPTEMBER 1, 2017

Chuck Dymer and I led the first step in a client’s multi-day strategic planning process this week. And fun was an important expectation since they found us by Googling “strategic planning fun” and downloading our eBook on the topic of fun strategic planning. We have been preparing the strategic planning process design for this workshop over the last month. They are a great example of how a client can powerfully support strategic planning success.

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eBook Exercises Engagement Design 74

BrainZooming

SEPTEMBER 11, 2017

That realization was a breakthrough in how we would create a strategy development exercise back when I ran strategic planning for a Fortune 500 corporation. The consultants we worked with to help us develop our first big strategic marketing plan back in 1997, didn’t provide productive structure to help us. It was about fully-formed answers with no real support to help business and marketing managers do the strategic thinking to develop their strategies.

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Exercises eBook Strategy Strategy 76

BrainZooming

APRIL 5, 2017

Talking to executives, you hear the expectation that an organization should implement a solid strategic plan strategy-by-strategy. To the extent a strategic plan is not implemented in that way, it falls short in some fashion. This goes along with the idea that if you never remove the big strategic planning notebook from your office shelf, it is a complete failure: you might as well not even do a strategic plan. More effectively creates alignment in strategic thinking.

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Collaboration Exercises Strategic Management Engagement 73

BrainZooming

NOVEMBER 2, 2017

Strategic Thinking Exercises – 5 Questions to Test Your Vision Statement Impact . Strategic Thinking Exercises – Where Does Your Brand Live? . A Strategic Creative Brief – 4 Benefits for Your Communications Efforts . Find engaging topics your brand can credibly address via social-first content. Brainzooming - All Posts Branding Compilations Strategic Thinking Strategy brand strategy

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Exercises Strategy Strategy eBook 71

BrainZooming

MAY 16, 2017

Are you involved with the strategic planning process for your organization? That could involve leading it, participating in it, or trying to influence the strategic planning process so it delivers more value and better results for the organization? 7 Strategic Planning Process Challenges You Can Fix! Typical complaints about a strategic planning process. If you have a role in strategic planning, do any of these describe your situation?

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eBook Exercises Strategic Management Leadership 83

BrainZooming

MARCH 10, 2017

Ironwood Pharmaceuticals is targeting both learning and emotion to prompt engagement and risk taking among its nearly 700 employees. To further engage its team, Ironwood asks staff to submit clever early-stage names for products in development. Something to Think about for Your Business: How does your organization create opportunities for all employees to invest in innovation, even if you are not looking for them to generate or develop new product ideas?

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Strategy Strategy eBook Idea Generation 88

BrainZooming

FEBRUARY 13, 2017

Decompose the vision into strategic dimensions. Strategic dimensions are areas where an organization has the opportunity to make major decisions or where industry players are creating competitive advantage. After identifying a handful of strategic dimensions, create a list of possible options the organization could choose on each one. Visualize those scenarios and depict them so everyone in the organization has a common source from which to imagine the future strategically.

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Strategy Strategy eBook Exercises 81

BrainZooming

SEPTEMBER 8, 2017

We just created twenty-five year roadmaps for a client’s strategic planning process in two hours and forty-five minutes. How do we eliminate so much time from typical strategic planning process approaches? 11 Ways to Speed Up Your Strategic Planning Process. Here are eleven things we do differently to speed up developing strategy: We design the strategic planning process to fit your organization and team – not the other way around.

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Exercises Roadmap eBook Survey 74

BrainZooming

MARCH 15, 2017

Short Story: Instead of voting on strategic priorities, use exercises incorporating individual perspectives and strategic conversations to make fact-based decisions on where to focus your company’s attention. How do you approach prioritizing strategic opportunities ? Prioritizing Strategic Opportunities. After every idea is placed, the group engages in a strategic conversation about each idea’s placement.

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eBook Exercises Groups Strategy 77

BrainZooming

SEPTEMBER 5, 2017

Based on executives visiting the Brainzooming website, there is considerable interest right now in “strategic planning icebreaker activities.” I guess that isn’t surprising. This is the time of year when most organizations that are going to do strategic planning are thinking about it or have already started. 2 New Strategic Planning Icebreaker Activities. Here are two brand new ideas for strategic planning icebreaker activities.

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eBook Exercises Disruption Groups 72

BrainZooming

MAY 31, 2017

These duties would give customers exposure to smart, strategic, and dynamic team members they might never typically know. The right combination of outside perspectives and productive strategic thinking exercises enables your brand to ideate, prioritize, and propel innovative growth. Rapidly deploy effective strategic thinking exercises to spur innovation. Are your employees celebrities within your branding strategy activities?

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Strategy Strategy eBook Exercises 69

BrainZooming

MAY 2, 2017

You can’t invite others to collaborate on a strategic plan and later ignore them when you launch it. The strong value of collaborative strategic planning comes, in part, from involving parties critical to strong implementation even before you create the plan. Specific features include: 10 ways to simplify and strengthen the language you use to communicate strategic priorities. Does your organization excel at its strategy implementation process ?

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eBook Strategy Strategy Tips 71

BrainZooming

APRIL 21, 2017

The folks at Armada Corporate Intelligence offered an internal branding strategy take on the United Airlines woes, offering strategic thinking questions you can ask and answer to improve your brand’s resiliency and avoid brand crises. One wonders whether United strategized the possibilities with the officers before they boarded the plane to remove the passenger. 10 Lessons to Engage Employees and Drive Improved Results.

Strategy 72

Strategy Strategy Policies Report 72

BrainZooming

SEPTEMBER 18, 2017

I’m part of one of ten small teams within a seventy-plus-person volunteer group developing a multi-faceted strategic plan. Reflecting on it the next morning, something struck me: this is the first time I’ve participated in someone else’s strategic planning process in over a decade. Since we were promised an “easy, five-step strategy planning process” extending through early December, the timing overlaps many of you conducting your own strategic planning process cycles.

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eBook Groups Exercises Meeting 63

BrainZooming

MAY 22, 2017

I was thinking about tables recently, and the role they play in creating or thwarting team collaboration. Get rooms with way more square footage than you think you will need. This thinking inspired something we’ll be doing soon: eliminate the tables and use only a few chairs. Brainzooming - All Posts Collaboration Creativity Innovation Performance Strategic Thinking

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Collaboration Meeting Groups Engagement 69

BrainZooming

JUNE 7, 2017

“Inside the Executive Suite” from Armada Corporate Intelligence featured ideas keeping executives focused on strategic priorities during strategic planning meetings. If your team wanders away from the important strategic topic, here’s a strategy to address it: 3 Ways to Keep Strategic Priorities Front and Center with Executives via Inside the Executive Suite. Keeping Strategic Priorities Front and Center. Actively Listening for Strategic Information.

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Meeting eBook Groups Strategy 71

BrainZooming

MARCH 2, 2017

What types of strategic planning activities are in a strategic thinking workshop ? As we collaborate with a client to design strategic planning activities for a strategic thinking workshop , we explore various possibilities. The goal is making sure the strategic planning activities we select best match the organization, the objective, and the participants. 6 Potential Strategic Planning Activities for a Workshop.

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eBook Groups Strategic Thinking Exercises 40

BrainZooming

MARCH 3, 2017

Yesterday, we identified the six types of strategic planning process activities we use to design a client’s strategic thinking workshop. To facilitate you going deeper into thinking about how these activities function within a strategic planning process workshop, here are articles in each of the six areas. 6 Types of Strategic Planning Process Activities. Fun Strategic Planning Activities – Do you like answering ice breaker questions?

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eBook Analysis Case Study Team Building 40

BrainZooming

OCTOBER 9, 2017

I dropped a variation of the question into an online collaboration workshop for a client’s strategic planning process. Based on the results, it has a new role as a strategic planning question. Since the online collaboration is anonymous and knowing that there were likely other issues that leaders STILL hadn’t felt comfortable introducing, I added this strategic planning question on the fly: Is there anything else we haven’t covered that we should address?

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eBook Exercises Groups Strategy 55

BrainZooming

FEBRUARY 8, 2017

We’re getting a lot of questions currently about identifying the right strategic planning exercises. 10 Questions You Must Consider about Strategic Planning Exercises. If you’re among the executives planning for strategic planning, no matter what time of year, you need to ask these ten questions as you consider the right strategic planning exercises and approaches to pursue: Do we know what the expected outcome needs to be? Stimulate fresh thinking.

Exercises 40

Exercises eBook Analysis Strategic Thinking 40

BrainZooming

MARCH 23, 2017

In nearly every instance, we spend time with a prospective client discussing three aspects of their strategic planning process needs : What they think they want to achieve. Conducting a Strategic Planning Process with a Certain Framework. What the prospective client wants to achieve: “We’ve sold-in a specific strategic planning process methodology, so that’s the approach we need to take.”. Current strategic initiatives already underway.

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Exercises eBook Groups Engagement 58

BrainZooming

MAY 23, 2017

If you are doing strategic planning activities for a support function within a matrix organization , you can face challenges deciding what the plan should emphasize. For strategic planning activities within a matrix organization, however, the ideal is to foster a shared strategic mindset between the line organization and support areas. Both line and functional areas should be leading the organization in the same direction with complementary strategic initiatives.

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eBook Exercises Resources System 51

BrainZooming

JANUARY 31, 2017

Maybe you have done something similar before, or maybe you have never led a strategic planning process. Since this was a recent search topic here, we are sharing our recommendations for ideas on coordinating a strategic planning process workshop. Using structure, exercises, and strategic thinking questions effectively. Engaging participants. Strategic Planning Process – Ideas for a Workshop to Develop Strategy. Engaging a Team to Develop Strategy.

Exercises 40

Exercises eBook Strategy Strategy 40

Paul Hobcraft

MARCH 10, 2017

How can we establish Innovation as the vital link to a process of change and strategic direction options? One that lifts the debates of managing today’s business by linking it into the future and then turning this thinking into a series of plausible and coherent set of activities? We innovators certainly need a new model of change , for at least eight important reasons I can think of: 1. There are different traits, actions and activities to think through.

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Agile Strategic Thinking System Culture 110

BrainZooming

JANUARY 24, 2017

I had the opportunity to see Dayton Moore, General Manager of the Kansas City Royals , discuss his perspective on organizational harmony as he opened the Jump Start 2017 conference in Atlanta. 10 Keys to Engaging Employees to Improve Strategic Results. Creating Strategic Impact” Leaders need high-impact ways to develop employees that can provide input into strategic planning and then turn it into results.

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Conference Strategy Strategy Engagement 40