This week I ran an Ideas Blitz session with 30 of the nation’s most senior CFO’s.
Due to the nature of this tool the sessions are always interactive and engaging.
However I was warned before the session that financial managers and leaders are not usually known for their creativity and that they might not enjoy the hands on nature of the session.
As it turns out both of these fears were totally unfounded.
Finance managers and leaders are as creative as anyone I have met in the corporate world.
What’s more they all seemed to enjoy the interactions and collaboration between the group members.
The challenge I set them was:
What can our business do to double its growth rate in the next 12 months?
I knew this would be a challenging and relevant topic for this group.
Each leader then worked by themselves and tried to generate 9 ideas in 2 minutes (i.e. the magic formula).
They then worked with a partner to discuss, enhance, make new connections and evaluate their best growth ideas.
One leader came up with the following 9 ideas:
– Form a new allliance
– Conduct a database analysis
– Have the CEO delegate more
– Reduce the number of meetings
– Make faster decisions whilst avoiding analysis-paralysis
– Set a daily new membership target
– Focus more on retaining our members
– Stop the major, expensive annual conference and hold a number of smaller, more frequent ones.
– Invest more in advertising
What is interesting about using Ideas Blitz is that if you asked many of these participants if they were creative the answer might have been no or not really.
Yet in just 2 minutes each of them could create 9 starting ideas to a difficult challenge.
This experience is a bit like playing golf or any sport — you perform at your best when you don’t over think it but just trust yourself.
It is for this reason why I love teaching others how to Ideas Blitz.
It is the ideal tool for time-poor people, regardless of role, position, age or education to become more creative, innovative and productive.