Creative thinking techniques to shake up your business strategy

Creative thinking techniques to shake up your business strategy

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

In business, as with life, applying this rule can result in sketching out the same approach year after year with the same – or worsening – results.

It may not be broken, but it doesn’t mean it can’t be better.

Creative thinking during strategic planning can uncover radically new ways of approaching an ever-changing market environment – bringing with it the potential for new opportunities, competitive advantage and a more responsive business model.

While inspiration is unlikely to strike like a thunderbolt, there are creative thinking techniques that can help your teams unshackle their minds, reimagine perspectives and draft new solutions.

Bring together different viewpoints

To foster creativity and innovation, assemble a team with diverse perspectives, roles and backgrounds and great listening skills. It’s helpful to include people with varied tenures to bring outside industry knowledge to test the way you’ve approached problems previously.

For strategic conversations, it’s important to use an external facilitator. This enables the whole team to participate in the thinking. An independent facilitator will bypass internal hierarchies and ensure that everyone contributes, making certain that new ideas aren’t just tossed into the void but are picked up and examined regardless of origin.

Upend the dominant wisdom

Identify and challenge the thinking that underpins the status quo.

You can do this by interrogating the assumptions behind your processes – and trying to prove them wrong. This creative thinking technique can uncover surprising insights.

Try these exercises to generate new possibilities and connections:

Link products or services that seem independent from or even in tension with one another.
Look at limitations in your organisation and turn them into strengths.
Consider how a similar problem was solved in an entirely different context.
Question: “what has to be true to make x happen?”, “why does it have to be that way?”

Embrace disagreement

Unexamined internal narratives can lead to established teams automatically dismissing ideas, opinions or approaches that are countercultural. But by allowing this, we remove the possibility of understanding a different – and likely insightful – viewpoint.

Instead, lean in when you encounter different ideas to understand what would need to be true for that perspective to be correct. What you glean may surprise you.

Use creative tools

As a high school art teacher, Three Chairs’ founder Melanie Bois taught students to capture, synthesise and evaluate artistic communication through paints, inks and other media. Three Chairs aims to bring this same learning into the boardroom when facilitating corporate strategy.

For 21st century professionals, mixing up the media looks like swapping the whiteboard for coloured pens and paper or digital canvases like Miro, or doing your strategic thinking in an inspiring landscape (hint: skip the boardroom!).

Use toys like lego or playdough to get the teams to build something before you start. This might feel awkward, but this is where an independent consultant can soak up the cynicism and help push teams into a different space.

Engaging in lateral thinking activities prompts new thought processes. An example of this type of exercise is to describe a problem and think of the worst possible way to solve it. Then find a way to make that idea viable. This might not land the answer you need, but it will take you out of a rigid, linear thought pattern into a much more courageous, creative and rewarding process.

Three Chairs’ consultants have an ethos of creativity around strategy and problem solving. To break out of a strategy rut, get in contact with us at:

[email protected]

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