Collect plenty of ideas

Not just one idea or three, but plenty. You never know when you’ll need them.

Many people ask me about my blogs and posts.

They ask:

- How do you post everyday?

- How do you come up with ideas?

- Tell me/show me how you do it...

The key things you need are to be able to generate content, to deliver value via that content and then to execute on the idea ... among that is to have a wad of ideas. (I don’t know how many a wad is!)

I focus on ‘curating’ my ideas; collecting them as I think of them. I don’t ’sit down to have a good idea’. I grab them when they arrive. Once collected in an Evernote file, I wander through that file each day and think, ‘which of these ideas is buzzing for me?’ (Singing, buzzing, humming, glowing - whatever the verb, it’s about the idea that I react to.)

That’s the one I pick ... and then I write.

I don't stockpile pre-canned posts.

I don't copy and paste from the past.

It's more like I’m riffing from an idea I collected, likely a while ago - days, weeks, months.

You can do it too… to share your thinking, ideas, thoughts and value.

Become what I call a ‘Leader of Value’. So to get started, collect plenty of ideas.

How you handle a problem

When you were most recently working on a problem, a conundrum or a tricky situation, how were you handling the problem? Were you talking about it? Say, sitting around a table with other people, just talking it through? Or were you ‘handling the problem’? Did you actually get your hands on the problem?

When we physically work with a problem, see, feel and imagine the pieces of it and move things around, we solve it quicker.

If we do, that means the l-o-n-g meetings we’re in (where we are usually just talking about the problem) will be finished sooner! We'll come up with better ideas and solutions and we generate a greater range of possibilities.

A product development team at a consumer goods business used cards with the key issues, challenges and obstacles written on them. They moved the cards around on the meeting table.

Seems simple, right? Engagement, participation and buy-in was boosted, and people more clearly understood what the details of the issue were all about.

Try not to just talk about the problem - but get your hands on it! You'll bring more people into the work to be done. 

Just thinking, or capturing the thinking

Working on tasks like problem solving, idea generation or planning and decision making means we can get into some pretty heavy thinking.

I wonder... are we doing too much thinking and not enough capturing of the thinking?

Have you had that situation where you've come up with an idea, some clever thoughts and then ... it's gone, disappeared as quickly as it arrived? Can't remember it?

It’s a waste to think great things and not net, trap or curate and gather them. Too often we dismiss our thoughts and ideas as not being valuable, but they’ve just been created as thoughts; they haven’t been further morphed into an action or an implementable thing.

Give yourself the credit that yes, you did come up with an idea, a possibility. Then capture it as soon as you can!

A library of ideas is something to draw from later on.

We can't always sit down and expect brilliant ideas to come to us on demand. Rather, we can capture them when they come throughout our daily habits and activities. This is the clever art of idea curation.

Q: Do you lose your ideas or do you catch them?

Ideas that spread...win

 

In the fight for attention in a world full of noise, how do you make your message interesting, engaging, actionable and viral?

Seth Godin asked 'how do you make something 'new'?" when he delivered a presentation on his tour in Australia last year. I visually captured his presentation ... and then my visual idea of his idea was shared. 

We have chances, opportunities and choices to connect with people and get our message across. How well are we really doing?

Think of the word 'remarkable' : what is it that makes what you're sharing, selling, saying remark-able, or worth making a remark about. 

Seth Godin encourages us to be impresarios: producers, creators, curators.
What's creative about your message, your thinking and the change you're leading?

PowerPoint slide decks are dull and boring; bullet points are bullish*t!

What's the cost of people not seeing (or sharing) your message? Or the cost of you not seeing another way to create and deliver it?

Seth says attention is precious.

Make the most of it when you get the opportunity to share your idea. 

Fire up the BBQ - it's ideas time

It's summer in Australia; there's sunshine, beaches, cool drinks and plenty of barbeques to be had. Before you put anything on the BBQ, turn it on, heat it up and prime it, ready for the tasty treats to be grilled and flamed... beyond recognition!

Priming the BBQ is like getting people ready for doing good work, producing tasty treats and creating great stuff. 

Too often we expect things from people when they're 'cold', as in "come up with some ideas on ..." or "tell me what you think about ...'

We've all got lots on our mind; give people time to get up to speed and be focused on what you're asking. 

You need to warm people up, prime them and create the environment so they'll deliver, and cook up some goodness. 

I think there are four stages or elements to priming people to come up with ideas or respond to your request:

1. environment - creating the right space so it's possible to think creatively and generatively;

2. mindset - framing why we're doing this ideas thing and how it will be used;

3. process - setting up the stages of the idea generation and gathering; what will happen now, next; and

4. acknowledge - reward and recognise early contributors, all participation and the success and progress being made. 

And then when it's done, finish it. Shut it done and stop.

Then move on to the next thing.

Fire them up, prime them and frame it so you will all get to taste the great stuff created. And you'll want to come back for seconds!