I wasn’t vague blogging recently when mentioning vision problems that have kept me from regularly blogging the last 18 months. Several people wondered what the situation was. I’m sharing more detail because, even in my eye problems, there’s a great organizational vision lesson present, too. Sometime in 2019, I began experiencing a noticeable decline in vision, starting with difficulty in seeing computer screens. That created more frequent typos along with the inability to sit down with a laptop or tablet and write when away from a big monitor. I also experienced challenges driving, especially ..read more

Brainzooming questions, tools, and exercises come from diverse sources. We often imagine them from reading between the lines of articles describing innovation successes. We’ll digest how organizations ranging from corporations to entrepreneurs and nonprofits are pursuing innovative growth. Then, we envision lists of questions and prompts that could have triggered their innovative strategies. The January issue of Feast Magazine, which “broadens the conversation about food and engages a large, hungry audience of food-lovers” around the Midwest published its Rising Stars issue. Feast profiled twe ..read more

What options are there when assembling a leadership team or board of directors who want to do blue sky thinking for big ideas? Seems simple, although delivering on this objective requires deft design to enable a collaboration with a chance of producing big thinking. A nonprofit executive asked how Brainzooming would approach this request from her organization’s board. The board members want to think big on the heels of the organization wrapping up its current strategic plan. When Brainzooming starts customizing a collaboration, we shift into design mode. That includes working through varied di ..read more

Collaboration dynamics changed dramatically in March 2020, especially for business meetings expected to foster groups effectively innovating. Organizations moved to video calls when in-person collaboration vanished. This relatively easy answer helped maintain connections among employees and with customers. But quickly adopting Zoom or even implementing Teams or Slack did not address the new and broader opportunities for collaboration. The Worst Online Meeting Hall of Fame The pandemic eliminated many persistent challenges to increasing collaboration. These challenges represent the friction i ..read more

In any collaborative meeting, you, as a leader, have an opportunity to foster innovative thinking. Moving to an anonymous, text-based online collaborative environment, though, offers multiple new, intriguing possibilities for leaders to cultivate innovation. For example, while designing and facilitating an early Brainzooming online collaboration in 2013, a nonprofit’s leader decided to change his participant role. Wanting to push his team’s thinking, he used online collaboration’s anonymity to introduce big, potentially uncomfortable ideas he suspected his team either: Wanted to share but wou ..read more

We are all approaching one year of personal, business, and global disruption from the pandemic. In light of that, the Brainzooming team wants to share with you our learnings and thinking on the next generation of successful business meetings. Look for updates throughout March about new ways to approach virtual, in-person, and hybrid meetings to maximize inclusion, productivity, and impact! Business Meetings 1.0: We’re All Together During the typical in-person business meeting, we can all see and hear everyone. We generally know who is saying what. We can read their body language. Maybe most ..read more

You are considering a new opportunity. It’s in the early stages. You have some sense of the idea or concept. It’s an attractive possibility, yet you are still very early in understanding how this possibility fits relative to your objectives. In a situation like this, when do you decide to put on your long-term glasses? Those are the ones that shift your perspective to what the opportunity will look like years from now, when the new wears off. When today’s initial excitement has faded from memory, and, if you made the wrong assessment, you’ll be kicking yourself on the daily. So, when DO you a ..read more

The math of maximizing your return on investment (ROI) is straight forward: generate as much in returns as possible while investing as little as possible to create them. Up with the R. Down with the I. Success! One strategy to achieve that result? Milk your big investment in every possible way after you’ve made it. Stretch it, morph it, contort it. Protect every return, no matter how meager, at all costs. If you do that, you won’t have to invest much more to generate seemingly acceptable returns. Using this approach, any return you get looks (maybe even feels) like a good thing. You settle for ..read more

You’ve heard of virtual hugs. What about shadow hugs? I won’t be demonstrating shadow hugs on Tuesday’s free Jumpstart Your Business Operations webinar. I will discuss, though, how shadow hugs are a simple example of an important concept right now: reevaluating your brand promise and innovating new experiences for your audiences to ensure your brand is positioned to still succeed in a pandemic-shaped world. By the way, you are invited to register and participate in both this Tuesday’s webinar (on quickly re-imagining your business & growth strategy) and the companion webinar on Tuesday, J ..read more

It’s been weeks since the last Brainzooming blog. Sorry about that, especially for those of you who’ve noticed and wondered what happened. The short answer? Dramatic changes in my activities throughout this pandemic took precedence. Since April, we’ve been developing and soft launching a new online collaboration experience called Blast! I also created and delivered a 6-part webinar series addressing The New Important for businesses trying to innovate and restart during the pandemic; the webinar series involved a 2 ½ hour combination of existing and new frameworks plus creating six eBooks in fi ..read more