How many times have you been in a marketing or new product development meeting and been asked by the meeting's leader to think out-of-the-box to come up with innovative ideas? How many times have you been that team leader asking your colleagues to come up with those out-of-the-box ideas? Most marketers have been in one or both of these positions too many times to count, but what happens when out-of-the-box thinking is received with blank stares and a silent room?
The authors of a new report from the Harvard Business Review called "Breakthrough Thinking from Inside the Box" suggest that many people find it difficult to embrace the kind of abstract thinking that it takes to come up with out-of-the-box suggestions. Instead of putting the onous on employees who might be facing that obstacle and feel like they're failing because out-of-the-box ideas don't pop into their heads easily, the authors, Kevin Coyne, Particia Gorman Clifford and Renee Dye, recommend that the team leader take control and jumpstart that creative thinking that makes out-of-the-box ideas flow. To do this, they have developed 21 questions for developing new products, which can be modified to work in any marketing or business meeting where out-of-the-box thinking is desired.
So much of marketing is about creative, innovative, out-of-the-box thinking, and it is very true that tapping into that part of our brains can be a challenge (certainly more so for some people than others). Naturally, a good marketing team will be made up of a variety of people with different thought patterns, work styles and personalities. It's up to the team leader to select a team to ensure the team members are diverse enough to create a well-rounded group then to make those diverse people come together and work cohesively. I applaud the authors of this report for recognizing that people do think differently, and the team leader must 'lead' those people into coming up with the results needed to make the team and company successful.
I think this theory goes along with my idealistic vs. pragmatic marketers post that I wrote back in October. What do you think? Do you find abstract thinking easy or challenging?
I'm often fascinated by the ways in which non-native speakers use language in unconventional ways.
Therefore, when I feel a piece of copy is stale, I will sometimes autotranslate my text into French, for example, and then retranslate it into English. The result is startling as it sometimes opens my mind to whole new perspectives on the idea.
I will do this several times: into Spanish, German, even Chinese or Russian -- as many options as are available. And then I will take each text separately and score it in a little piece of copywriting software called Glyphius (Glyphius.com), correcting for readability and attempting to push the score as high as possible. Using this simple paradigm shift, I have at times multiplied the effectiveness of the work (be it measured by conversion rate or time on page, etc) many times over.
Posted by: Halfa Lump | December 10, 2007 4:26 PM | Permalink to Comment