Build Your Creative Confidence with a good process.

Google

By Gary Peacock

Do you need to unlock your creative potential?

Have a look at this 12 minute long video about how you can be more creative with your business problems. David Kelley is founder of legendary design firm IDEO, the company that created many icons of the digital generation like the first mouse.  But what matters even more to him is unlocking the creative potential of people and organisations so they can innovate routinely.

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_kelley_how_to_build_your_creative_confidence.html

We agree with David that you can be far more creative when solving your business problems. Try solving your strategic problems with our one day process: Solve Your Impossible Problem. You won’t believe what you can do in just one day, contact us on +61 2 9450 1040 or at www.gordianbusiness.com.au.

Do you need to Persuade Faster?

Google

By Gary Peacock

During one session with a client, on a flip chart we summarized the pressures acting on their buyer:

1. More Results
2. Less Time
3. More Problems

This client’s buyer was under pressure to produce more results: higher sales and higher margins. The buyer was expected to deliver better results in less time; they wanted results faster. However, the buyer has less personal time to deliver more results because fewer buyers do more work. Finally, they are facing more problems: from outside their business, competitors and governments make their tasks harder and from inside their business, other departments are not cooperating or have different priorities.

Given these three pressures— more results, less time and more problems— our client must find ways to persuade faster. Presenting data in the traditional way would take too long. Without getting the buyer’s attention and action, our client would not get results and the buyer would not get results either. Many businesses face similar challenges. Do you need to persuade faster?

‘We must go fast, because the race is against time.’ Anna Held

Persuading With Data Faster

In some businesses, a critical part of persuasion is to give insights from data: tables and graphs. For many of us Excel, Word and PowerPoint are part of our business life. Anyone can produce a table or chart. Even my teenage daughter regularly produces tables and charts.

Yet, most people just accept what appears from Microsoft or from their data provider. Typically if it looks professional: that will do. However, in business presentations most tables and charts I see are unpersuasive. In many businesses, how to make data persuasive is a neglected competitive advantage.

‘Concentrating on the essentials. We will then be accomplishing the greatest possible results with the effort expended.’ Ted W. Engstrom

Once you see how fast you can persuade with data, you will understand why the companies who know keep it a secret. Also why the companies that know the secrets stand out from the competition?

Try this simple test: take 5 of your slides, show them to a colleague and ask:

1. What are the messages of the five slides
2. Rate the slides on a scale of -10 to +10, where -10 is boring, 0 is neutral and +10 is exciting. 

Then just listen.

•          How fast do they get the messages?
•          How often do they get a different message to the one you intended?
•          Which slides were rated as exciting?

If you want to see a more persuasive version of your data, send us your most boring data slide and we will send back a version that will help you persuade faster, send it to gary@gordianbusiness.com.au.

‘Footprints on the sands of time are not made by sitting down’.  Proverbs

Take a different view and solve your problems faster

Google

By Gary Peacock

Do you have a problem that seems impossible to solve? One reason could be how the problem is stated. Typically, you see a problem from one view: from one perspective. But as JK Galbraith says, sometimes this protects us from thinking.

"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."

John Kenneth Galbraith

One way to get a different view

Imagine you have a problem with the productivity of your team.  You might state your problem as: Increase the productivity of my team. To get a different view, a simple technique is to rewrite the problem as a bigger problem and rewrite the problem as a smaller problem.

A bigger problem might be: increase the productivity of my department; A smaller problem might be increase the productivity of Barbara. So summarising you now have three different views of the problem.

 

Now you have three different views to choose from.  When you do this you will find this simple exercise forces you to create different views of the same problem.  This may make you realise the fastest way to solve your problem is to solve a bigger problem. Or you may find the fastest way to solve your problem is to solve the smaller problem. Even if you choose to solve the original problem, you have three different views of the problem and will solve the problem faster. This simple tool helps us quickly get different points of view.

“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”

 George Eliot

Other ways of getting a different view

"A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world."

John le Carre

A quick way to get a different view is to leave your desk and talk to others, especially customers.  A client was recently complaining about an unresponsive and inflexible IT department not being willing to make it faster and easier for salespeople to access systems when out of the office.  A quick way of getting IT to change is to send them out for a day or two with a salesperson to visit customers.  As they see and experience the pain of using systems outside the office, they will start to find ways to improve the systems, fast. 

As Margaret Attwood says, Reality simply consists of different points of view. A quick way to get a different perspective is ask others from different departments how they see the problem. In every organization there are people who always have a different view to most other people. Find those people in your organization and have a coffee with them. They will always give you a different view. Remember the words of Comedian, George Carlin: 

“Some people see the glass half full. Others see it half empty.

I see a glass that's twice as big as it needs to be.”

Do your people feel responsible for innovation?

By Gary Peacock
The last question Gary Hamel asked in his short 9-minute video was: Do you feel personally responsible for innovation? How can you do this?

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To solve impossible problems faster, be unreasonable.

By Gary Peacock
Gary Hamel recommends working on a prototype and recommends freeing up 50% of available time and freeing up some money to work on the project. All the businesses I have worked with are already pushed for resources: they don’t have enough time, money or people to do what they want. So, how can you get the resources—time, money and people – to work on some of your organizations problems?

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