Strategy Survival Guide

Revolution
This is creativity at its most provocative. It is the deliberate challenging of rules and assumptions. Very often,
our ability to come up with innovative ideas is limited by the rules of our own particular river. Revolution
breaks those rules. Here are 5 questions that may get you started:
• What if we did nothing?
• What if we had to do it at half the cost? - reduce adult learning courses to bare essentials and have
'key points' packs
• What if demand was twice as high? - energy may lead to home study groups
• What if we reversed the process? - young adults have to teach a skill to others
• What if we exaggerated the issue? - information everywhere: billboards with dates of major battles,
bus tickets with useful foreign words
Re-expression
The way tasks and issues are expressed tends to be limited. We rely on jargon, which send us off down the
same old rivers of thought. Describing the problem in a different way can make the brain jump to a new river.
Re-expression is a way to do this:
• Re-express with alternative words
• Re-express using different senses
• Re-express from someone else’s perspective (e.g. a child, an alien)
• How would it appear to Napoleon? Or Abraham Lincoln? Or Florence Nightingale?
Related worlds
Never assume you are the only person to have faced an issue like the one you are facing, or that you cannot
learn from the world around you. Related worlds is a technique that allows you to harness the experience of
others in a creative way. For example, the roll-on deodorant was invented by stealing the principles from
ball-point pens.
• importance of ‘freshness’
• visit other businesses
• talk to people not in the field
• look in other disciplines (e.g. nature)
See the in practice example from the Strategy Unit Workforce Development project.
Synectics: Developing an idea from a brainstorming session
Brainstorming sessions are great for generating hundreds of ideas and building up energy and motivation
within a team. The danger is that all this will be lost if the ideas are not developed and are either abandoned
or shared too soon.
Synectics is a creativity consultancy that has pioneered a way to develop ideas beyond the initial phase to
really implementable new solutions. They have a model that can be represented by the diamond shape
below:
Strategy Survival Guide – Strategy Skills
Page 108