Someone asked me earlier this year if I had simply gone to a facilitation training class, swiped the content, renamed it Brainzooming, and opened up shop.
My answer was an emphatic, "Definitely not!"
What has become the Brainzooming methodology developed from a wide variety of sources. It evolved into a tested approach for developing strategy that takes full advantage of the diverse inspirations from which its strategic thinking exercises originated.
I was reminded of the diversity of influences we incorporated while creating the Strategic Thinking Fake Book for a recent Creating Strategic Impact workshop.
In the workshop, we covered twelve different strategic thinking exercises in two hours. Revisiting the twelve strategic thinking exercises presented in the workshop, the inspirations are all over the place:
- A Fortune 500 CFO
- A strategic thinking book
- An advertising agency
- A poster from a poster shop in New Orleans
- A strategic mentor
- A magazine ad
- My own thinking about anticipating disruptive competitors
- A different advertising agency
- My own thinking about social media networks
- Lateral thinking principles
- Helping a co-worker try to think differently about a business situation
- An innovation consultant
The lesson here is there are great strategic thinking examples all around you.
Focus less on business gurus who get written up all the time in magazines and online. Their lessons are broadcast so broadly, there are many people trying to mimic them.
Look instead for the great lessons where perhaps YOU were the only person ever exposed to them who recognized them as strategic thinking lessons.
Those are the ones you can adapt and do something with to really set yourself apart. – Mike Brown
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