Ten Crazy Things to Do with Your Company This Month
By Jeffrey Baumgartner
If you want your organisation to be more innovative, your people need to be in the habit of thinking creatively. A great way to do that is to do crazy things from time to time. Here are ten suggestions for your company, business unit or team.
1. Rearrange your office by moving people around randomly
Rearrange the physical organisation of your office by moving people around in some totally random manner. Rather than leave accounting people together with other accounting people; sales people with sales people; operational people with operational people and so on, mix people up so that an accountant might have her desk next to a saleswoman and a logistics specialist might have his desk next to a research scientist. Better still rearrange the physical organisation every quarter or so. While this will result in some communication inefficiency – people in the same division do, after all, often need to work together – it will certainly bring about more varied internal networking and breed new ideas as people from different departments work together, get to know each other and share ideas.
2. Hold staff meetings in unusual locations
Hold staff meetings in unusual and varied locations. Why must you always have staff
meetings in your boring meeting rooms? Why not hold them in a public
library, a nearby park, a children's playground, a pub, in a swimming pool,
or any other location that is distinctly unbusinesslike? The unfamiliar
surroundings will surely inspire people. To make the unusual locations more
effective, tie them into the meeting somehow. If your company is having
financial difficulties, hold a meeting in a swimming pool and discuss the
importance of remaining afloat financially.
3. Put a totally inexperienced person in charge of a project
Put a person with no relevant experience in charge of a project. Need to do a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of a new product concept? Why have a marketing person to do it when an engineer can do it completely differently? Admittedly, the engineer will probably not produce a typical SWOT analysis – and might even miss a few key issues a marketing expert would automatically see. But an engineer would almost certainly take a different approach and look at the problem in a different way than the experienced marketer would. And looking at a problem from a different perspective is certain to produce different, creative solutions.
4. Run a competition to come up with the craziest idea for a crazy challenge and let the winner do it
Run an competition to come up with the craziest idea for a crazy challenge. For example, if you manufacture and sell plumbing supplies, ask for ideas for the craziest Valentines Day packaging for one of your products. Provide the winner(s) with Euro 10,000 (approx: US$13,000) to actually fund their idea. Sure, the project may fail. But the winners will gain more than Euro 10,000 worth of training and discover a lot of great ideas along the way. Moreover, crazy ideas work more often than you might think – and the result could be a substantial return on your Euro 10,000 investment.
5. Ban e-mail and telephone use for internal communications for a day
Ban e-mail and telephone use for internal communications for a day. Force people to get up and visit each other to discuss ideas. Moving around shakes up the brain cells and helps people think more clearly. Face to face conversations are usually in more depth than e-mail or telephone conversations. Physically walking across the office to talk to one person often results in meeting and speaking with several other people along the way; people who can bring new ideas to old problems and issues.
6. Apply a curious metaphor for the day
Come up with a running theme for the day, such as “cats” or “drinks” or “baking a cake” and apply the theme as a metaphor everywhere possible. For example, you select “baking a cake” as your theme for the day. Every project that day should then somehow tie into baking a cake. The sales people preparing a presentation should base it around the theme of baking a cake. The R&D people developing a prototype for a new product should think about baking cakes while brainstorming ideas for the prototype. And so on.
7. Get an eight year old child to act as a consultant for a day
Get an eight year old child to act as a consultant for a day. Set up meetings with the child and various business units. Ask the child for advice on problems and on-going projects. Ask managers to report on the child's advice and what they can learn from it. If the answer is "nothing", then managers should explain why. While the child's advice may lack the weight of experience of a seasoned professional, its comparative naïvety will doubtless be inspirational and lead to new ideas that an experienced professional would be blind to.
8. Use toys instead of PowerPoint slides
For one week, use toys instead of PowerPoint slides as a presentation tool. For example, if you have to present your ideas on a new product launch, use a big box of Lego or building blocks as your presentation tool. It will force you to think about how you present data visually and will certainly capture the attention of participants in the meeting.
9. Ask, “How would Winnie the Pooh solve this problem?"
Ask, “How would Winnie the Pooh [or George Washington or Queen Elizabeth I or Tintin or Jesus or whomever] tackle this problem” about all problems for a week. For example, if you are preparing a project proposal for a client, ask yourself: “How would Winnie-the-Pooh prepare and deliver this proposal?"
10. Everyone walks, bicycles or takes public transportation to work.
Insist, or at least actively encourage, that everyone walk, bicycle or take public transportation to work. Not only is this great for the environment, it is also good for the collective mind of your employees. If they are not driving to work, they can read, think, make notes and take more time to notice and be inspired by the scenery as they go to work.
What about your company? What kind of crazy things have you done – or would you like to do – with your company to inspire new ways of thinking? Tell me about them, please
Fancy Doing Some Crazy Stuff with Your Company, Division or Team?
Would you like to start doing some crazy, creativity-inspiring things in your organisation? If so, I can help, either by advising you or by giving an inspiring talk or seminar on the subject. Contact me and let's discuss what we can do!
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