I have been trying and not making progress on a new product development idea for us. Whatever the reasons, I was pretty much stuck for six weeks with little progress to report.

To try to figure out what I could do to get the new product development idea going, I started listing what changes would help create the currently elusive progress. The list was to help me mentally reframe the project. The ultimate goal? Fitting the project within the boundaries of where my creative energy was currently flourishing.

Strategic Thinking Questions for Unsticking Ideas

Strategic Thinking Questions to Stop

After jotting down a few ideas, I wrote two strategic thinking questions aimed at freeing up available time to focus:

  • What am I doing right now that I can stop focusing on and someone else can do?
  • What am I doing right now that can stop - or at least go on hiatus?

I shared these stop questions with a close friend, who was quite surprised by them.

Her surprise surprised me.

I try to ask these two strategic thinking questions all the time. They are both important factors in creating time and creative energy to address new opportunities. And they grow in importance once you've maxed out your available time - which I seemed to have done sometime in the past several years.

If you need to rearrange what's important to make room for what's new, try these questions. They'll stimulate ideas for you to make the changes work that you need to make to enable accomplishing new things. – Mike Brown

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