Revolutionary sales experts Matthew Dixon— Managing Director of the Corporate Executive Board’s Sales and Service Practice— and Brent Adamson— Senior Director of the Sales Executive Council— have developed an insightful technique to help organizations develop customized sales strategies. In their book, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation, they describe one of the most effective types of sales professionals: The Challenger. These people are able to confidently teach, tailor, and take control while leveraging constructive tension to their advantage throughout the sale. Take advantage of this game’s visual organization — as illustrated in The Challenger Sale— and extensive collaboration to identify how to balance the aspects of this technique. Extensive experience of the authors in the facilitation of games, their role as an enabler of learning and their potential to facilitate transformation. What better way to start a section on creative brainstorming than with a creativity exercise that turns the process on its head? With Bad Idea Brainstorm, start by writing the problem you are trying to solve on a post-it or inside a virtual whiteboard. Then, invite the group to come up with the worst possible ways to handle the problem.

When buying a feature, a customer may ask if other customers want to pool especially when money starts missing. Atomize– As we study complex systems, it’s often helpful to decompose large ideas or objects into smaller parts. For example, as we study cells in biology, this game can be used to help students learn the components of the cell. If your team is creating something new, this game can help you think about how to break the problem into parts. A common misconception of planning and organization is that it is a purely administrative process with no scope or need for creative thinking. When it comes to balancing budgets, planning with agile or lean thinking methodologies, being a creative thinker who can explore alternatives while still seeing the bigger picture can help create faster, more successful outcomes. Radical planning is a means to reconsider how you might approach your work and is a great way of bringing creativity meaningfully into your day-to-day working practices.Try some of these creative games for getting to know each other the next time you bring a team together and let us know how they went in the comments! At last, ask them to draw lines between the different products and services and highlight important relationships. Observation and intuition are critical design tools. This exercise helps you leverage both. Find clues about the context you’re designing for that may be hidden in plain sight.

A team-building activity in which groups must work together to build a structure out of LEGO, but each individual has a secret “assignment” which makes the collaborative process more challenging. It emphasizes group communication, leadership dynamics, conflict, cooperation, patience and problem solving strategy. Telling Our Stories Effective planning is often about correctly identifying what can help you reach a desired goal and assigning tasks to help your team reach that goal. With this creative thinking technique, your team will explicitly consider the gap between your desired future state and current position and brainstorm all the things that contribute to creating the gap between your current and desired positions.This lesson shows that ideas tend to be better if members work individually at first and then share with the team. It also shows that the best innovations solve real problems. 6. R&D High intensity creative games can be an effective way to find new perspectives and generate lots of ideas, but they’re not for everyone! Finding time and space for reflection, observation and a quieter approach to building on one another’s ideas is an alternative approach that really works. the degree of customer preparation: what pre-game activities, if any, to require of the participants before entering the game environment This thought process is extremely powerful for companies seeking to understand and leverage their landscape of opportunities. The ‘big picture’ that it provides is especially valuable for: A time frame can be added to remind that time goes from the inside (present) to the outside (future).