Price: $199.00
When you're trying to solve very difficult operational problems, traditional brainstorming has limited value. And it's even more limited when your goal is to reinvent your products, services or processes.
We've all been in situations -- like a Kaizen event, strategy session or just plain-old firefighting mode on a defect or problem -- when the group really struggled to come up with a truly different and viable solution. The key is to break through your team's knowledge limits and psychological inertia. This is where powerful, proven, out-of-the-bowl idea-generation techniques come into play. Run-of-the-mill brainstorming -- where everyone gets together to think and give it their best shot -- doesn't usually work.
The most successful brainstorming groups use aides, tools, and techniques for jolting themselves out of their comfort zones. They need guided pathways to help them navigate from what they know to what they don't know. They find a way to access applicable ideas and new knowledge that comes from far-afield domains, yet applies squarely to their challenge at hand. More ideas are not better. Nor are good or great ideas not quite focused on solving the rightly defined problem. Only truly innovative ideas focused on a well-defined problem can make really impressive improvements or innovations.
Does your company struggle with any of these problems?
- Doesn't know how to get beyond the voice of the customer to be truly innovative
- Follows a problem solving process that is too structured at times
- Keeps solving problems in the same way
Does your team:
- Over-collect and over-analyze data, still not achieving any breakthrough?
- Try to add features and functionalities to current products and services rather than question their underlying assumptions?
- Think in terms of its own products, services and solutions -- not in terms of the "jobs" those solutions are designed to get done?
- Generate a lot of ideas, but none that really solve the problem or clear the pathway for an innovation?
- Fear runaway creativity and its associated costs for lack of structure and controls (financial and ideological)?
If you answered yes to any of these, you need this training course. Your trainer will be Wes Waldo, a highly-rated management trainer and contributor to the popular bestselling book, The Innovator's Toolkit: 50+ Techniques for Predictable and Sustainable Organic Growth.
When you complete this CD-ROM training, you will leave with:
Knowledge
You'll learn how to use a number of mega-brainstorming and idea-generation techniques, all for the purpose of breaking through your knowledge limitations and psychological inertia.
A defined process
You'll have a path to follow when you want to innovate or generate unconventional, new and truly different ideas.
Confidence
You will know you can function and perform as a leader when the objective is more open-ended and challenging.
Course agenda:
What is brainstorming?
Benefits/gaps
What is better brainstorming?
Lateral thinking
4 step process
Select and define focus
Expand and shrink the focus
Mind mapping
Generate ideas
Random stimulus
Concept tree
Provocation and movement
Brainwriting 6-3-5
Key tasks
List of actionable ideas, concepts & broad concepts
Summary
Questions
Who should purchase this CD-ROM
- Operational excellence leaders and practitioners who want to add dimension and more expertise to their knowledge and toolkits.
- Innovation, strategy and marketing professionals who seek more intelligence and skill in defining the futures for their companies.
- Engineers, R&D professionals and teams that want to improve their insights and ability to innovate products, services and processes.
- Problem solvers and innovators who feel like they have the right team with the right talent, but can't seem to get it done!
Included with your CD-ROM
- 2-hour CD-ROM training course (slides and audio)
- Downloadable slides for note-taking
Instructor
Wes Waldo
Chief Operating Officer
BMGI
William "Wes" Waldo is a disciplined, organized and highly respected leader. As BMGI's Chief Operating Officer, he leverages more than 15 years of quality, operations management and process improvement experience as he strives for perfection in BMGI's sales, marketing and internal processes. Wes' appointment as COO follows many years as a Lean master consultant, Lean product manager and nearly two years as practice leader for BMGI's manufacturing team. A respected authority in his field, he co-authored the manual A Team Leader's Guide to Kaizen Events, and contributed to The Complete Idiot's Guide to Lean Six Sigma and The Innovator's Toolkit. Wes enjoys working with a wide variety of organizations from healthcare to high-end technology manufacturing, especially in the development of their strategic planning.
