What Is Brainwriting? from Mindtools April Newsletter
Brainwriting is similar to brainstorming – they're both methods for generating ideas and solutions for a problem.
Brainwriting, however, gives everyone equal opportunity to participate, and it enables all group members to think without any ‘blocking.'
Here are the steps of a brainwriting session:
Seat group members at a table, with a sheet of paper in front of each person. At the top of the page, ask them to write down the problem that everyone is trying to solve. (Note: They should NOT write their names.) Appoint someone to be moderator, and time each round.
Give the group three minutes to write down three ideas for how to solve the problem. They should not edit the ideas, or try to perfect them. Allow them to write in ‘free form.' Do not permit any discussion.
After three minutes, move on to round two. Ask everyone to pass their papers to the left, and then generate three more ideas on the new paper they have just received. They can build on the first three ideas that are already written, or think of three new solutions.
Ask the moderator to decide how many times the papers are passed around the table.
When all rounds are finished, collect the papers, and write all ideas on a whiteboard for everyone to see. Then begin discussing which ideas would work best for solving the current problem.
Benefits of Brainwriting
There are several advantages of using brainwriting in a group:
Because there's no discussion during the initial idea-generating rounds, you can produce many ideas in a very short amount of time.
All group members – even the quiet and shy people – have an equal chance of offering their ideas for consideration.
Everything is anonymous – you don't know who wrote which ideas – so there's more freedom to be truly creative. Participants are often empowered to suggest solutions that they otherwise might have thought were too unusual, or would not be well received.
Exchanging papers still allows group members to evaluate and build on other people's ideas, but in a much more concentrated, creative way.
When to Use Brainwriting
Brainwriting can be used to help solve almost any problem. The process is used often in marketing, design, and creative fields, but it's also gaining popularity in other areas.
Any time that you would traditionally use brainstorming to solve a problem, you could use brainwriting instead.
Key Points
Although brainstorming is the most common technique for generating ideas in a group, brainwriting can be much more effective, because it involves all participants on an equal basis. Both introverts and extroverts can participate, and you can produce more ideas in less time.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Three kinds of meetings
Here is Seth's thoughts on meetings... interesting.
Meetings are marketing in real time with real people. (A conference is not a meeting. A conference is a chance for a circle of people to interact).
There are only three kinds of classic meetings:
Information. This is a meeting where attendees are informed about what is happening (with or without their blessing). While there may be a facade of conversation, it's primarily designed to inform.
Discussion. This is a meeting where the leader actually wants feedback or direction or connections. You can use this meeting to come up with an action plan, or develop a new idea, for example.
Permission. This is a meeting where the other side is supposed to say yes but has the power to say no.
PLEASE don't confuse them. Confused meeting types are the number one source of meeting ennui. One source of confusion is that a meeting starts as one sort of meeting and then magically morphs into another kind. The reason this is frightening is that one side or the other might not realize that's actually occurring. If it does, stop and say, "Thanks for the discussion. Let me state what we've just agreed on and then we can go ahead and approve it, okay?"
While I'm at it, let me remind you that there are two kinds of questions.
Questions designed to honestly elicit more information.
Questions designed to demonstrate how much you know or your position on an issue and to put the answerer on the defensive.
There's room for both types of questions, particularly in a team preparing for a presentation or a pitch. Again, don't confuse them. I like to be sure that there's time for the first type, then, once everyone acknowledges that they know what's on the table, open it up for the second, more debate-oriented type of question.
Meetings are marketing in real time with real people. (A conference is not a meeting. A conference is a chance for a circle of people to interact).
There are only three kinds of classic meetings:
Information. This is a meeting where attendees are informed about what is happening (with or without their blessing). While there may be a facade of conversation, it's primarily designed to inform.
Discussion. This is a meeting where the leader actually wants feedback or direction or connections. You can use this meeting to come up with an action plan, or develop a new idea, for example.
Permission. This is a meeting where the other side is supposed to say yes but has the power to say no.
PLEASE don't confuse them. Confused meeting types are the number one source of meeting ennui. One source of confusion is that a meeting starts as one sort of meeting and then magically morphs into another kind. The reason this is frightening is that one side or the other might not realize that's actually occurring. If it does, stop and say, "Thanks for the discussion. Let me state what we've just agreed on and then we can go ahead and approve it, okay?"
While I'm at it, let me remind you that there are two kinds of questions.
Questions designed to honestly elicit more information.
Questions designed to demonstrate how much you know or your position on an issue and to put the answerer on the defensive.
There's room for both types of questions, particularly in a team preparing for a presentation or a pitch. Again, don't confuse them. I like to be sure that there's time for the first type, then, once everyone acknowledges that they know what's on the table, open it up for the second, more debate-oriented type of question.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Benchmarketing: Best Practice for Improving Marketing Performance
by Laura Patterson
Published on January 27, 2009
Thought this was worth sharing:
Ad Age's article published on January 5, 2009 ("Economy Weighs Heavily on Marketing Execs for 2009") started with, "Marketing executives are tired of buzzwords such as Web 2.0, blogs and social networking."
The article goes on to say that marketers are going back to the basics with an emphasis on addressing four areas: customer satisfaction, customer retention, marketing ROI, and brand loyalty.
While the economy certainly weighs heavy on all of our minds, marketers who use this opportunity wisely to improve performance and demonstrate their value will fare the best.
Our work reveals that CEOs and CMOs are interested in seeing marketing organizations improve their performance in two key areas: effectiveness (the ability to produce the desired result) and efficiency (reducing waste). The economic environment makes these efforts even more top of mind.
Often the question that remains is this: How much do we need to improve?
One way to assess your organization's performance and to understand what changes to make is through benchmarking. Robert Camp suggests that by using benchmarking to identify and replicate "best practices," a company can enhance its business performance.
This is a good time to do deploy benchmarking. The economic environment creates a level playing field. This two-part article explores how to use benchmarking to assess your organization's performance and to understand what changes to make.
Part 1 addresses what is benchmarking and its value. Part 2 identifies marketing capabilities and process that can be benchmarked and outlines the five phases associated with a successful benchmarking initiative.
What Is Benchmarking?
Webster defines benchmarking as the "study of a competitor's product or business practices in order to improve the performance of one's own company." In order to do benchmarking, one requires a benchmark: "a point of reference from which measurements may be made; that serves as a standard by which others may be measured or judged."
The American Productivity and Quality Center defines benchmarking as "the process of identifying, understanding, and adapting outstanding practices and process from organizations anywhere in the world to help your organization improve its performance."
Benchmarking is not the same as a metric. A metric is a comparative number, whereas a benchmark is a standard for the best.
The Value of Benchmarking
The idea behind benchmarking is that by implementing the best-practice for a particular process your company can close a performance gap in order to achieve superior results and enhance its own competitive advantage.
Benchmarking can produce tangible, quantifiable performance targets that you can consistently measure over recurring time cycles in order to ascertain performance changes and the impact of those changes on your organization. Frequent and regular benchmarking enables you to measure changes in your own performance relative to best-in-class companies. By using an external reference, you can gain insight into these best-practices.
The point of benchmarking is to collect data that will show you what can be achieved and provide you with the insight into how this performance was achieved.
To use benchmarking, you must have at least one company in the study that serves as the benchmark: the standard with which others compare themselves for both the way the process is run and the results obtained from that process. This benchmark can be either within or outside your industry.
The benefit of benchmarking is that it provides valuable insights into what drives performance. Companies have used benchmarking to evaluate hiring, customer service, equipment maintenance, collecting outstanding receivables, and so forth. Benchmarking can be done for nearly every business process, including marketing.
Unfortunately, many companies do not benchmark their marketing—a missed opportunity.
When times are tough, marketing is even more important to support revenue generation. Sadly, too many companies pull back on their marketing efforts during down cycles, essentially putting their revenue-generation efforts in idle mode.
The Profit Impact of Market Strategy research has shown that those companies which invest in marketing during a down cycle recover from the cycle faster, with increased gains, compared with those companies that turned off their marketing as a way to reduce costs.
There is an old saving that "one cannot save their way to revenue." In times such as these, we believe that a company should make sure that its marketing is firing on all cylinders and operating as effectively and efficiently as possible.
As the CEO or part of the leadership team, you should expect your marketing leadership team to be benchmarking the company's marketing processes in order to identify how much performance can be improved and how.
Published on January 27, 2009
Thought this was worth sharing:
Ad Age's article published on January 5, 2009 ("Economy Weighs Heavily on Marketing Execs for 2009") started with, "Marketing executives are tired of buzzwords such as Web 2.0, blogs and social networking."
The article goes on to say that marketers are going back to the basics with an emphasis on addressing four areas: customer satisfaction, customer retention, marketing ROI, and brand loyalty.
While the economy certainly weighs heavy on all of our minds, marketers who use this opportunity wisely to improve performance and demonstrate their value will fare the best.
Our work reveals that CEOs and CMOs are interested in seeing marketing organizations improve their performance in two key areas: effectiveness (the ability to produce the desired result) and efficiency (reducing waste). The economic environment makes these efforts even more top of mind.
Often the question that remains is this: How much do we need to improve?
One way to assess your organization's performance and to understand what changes to make is through benchmarking. Robert Camp suggests that by using benchmarking to identify and replicate "best practices," a company can enhance its business performance.
This is a good time to do deploy benchmarking. The economic environment creates a level playing field. This two-part article explores how to use benchmarking to assess your organization's performance and to understand what changes to make.
Part 1 addresses what is benchmarking and its value. Part 2 identifies marketing capabilities and process that can be benchmarked and outlines the five phases associated with a successful benchmarking initiative.
What Is Benchmarking?
Webster defines benchmarking as the "study of a competitor's product or business practices in order to improve the performance of one's own company." In order to do benchmarking, one requires a benchmark: "a point of reference from which measurements may be made; that serves as a standard by which others may be measured or judged."
The American Productivity and Quality Center defines benchmarking as "the process of identifying, understanding, and adapting outstanding practices and process from organizations anywhere in the world to help your organization improve its performance."
Benchmarking is not the same as a metric. A metric is a comparative number, whereas a benchmark is a standard for the best.
The Value of Benchmarking
The idea behind benchmarking is that by implementing the best-practice for a particular process your company can close a performance gap in order to achieve superior results and enhance its own competitive advantage.
Benchmarking can produce tangible, quantifiable performance targets that you can consistently measure over recurring time cycles in order to ascertain performance changes and the impact of those changes on your organization. Frequent and regular benchmarking enables you to measure changes in your own performance relative to best-in-class companies. By using an external reference, you can gain insight into these best-practices.
The point of benchmarking is to collect data that will show you what can be achieved and provide you with the insight into how this performance was achieved.
To use benchmarking, you must have at least one company in the study that serves as the benchmark: the standard with which others compare themselves for both the way the process is run and the results obtained from that process. This benchmark can be either within or outside your industry.
The benefit of benchmarking is that it provides valuable insights into what drives performance. Companies have used benchmarking to evaluate hiring, customer service, equipment maintenance, collecting outstanding receivables, and so forth. Benchmarking can be done for nearly every business process, including marketing.
Unfortunately, many companies do not benchmark their marketing—a missed opportunity.
When times are tough, marketing is even more important to support revenue generation. Sadly, too many companies pull back on their marketing efforts during down cycles, essentially putting their revenue-generation efforts in idle mode.
The Profit Impact of Market Strategy research has shown that those companies which invest in marketing during a down cycle recover from the cycle faster, with increased gains, compared with those companies that turned off their marketing as a way to reduce costs.
There is an old saving that "one cannot save their way to revenue." In times such as these, we believe that a company should make sure that its marketing is firing on all cylinders and operating as effectively and efficiently as possible.
As the CEO or part of the leadership team, you should expect your marketing leadership team to be benchmarking the company's marketing processes in order to identify how much performance can be improved and how.
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