One challenge for many leaders in every industry is having the confidence in their skills and expertise that they are willing to look outside of their core group or their industry for ideas on how to tackle situations that they may not have all the answers for, or just to continue to push growth in the way that they hope to.
In most cases, the answer to a situation like this isn’t to retrench and “brainstorm” or just do more of what made you successful, but, instead, it is to focus on looking for ways to bring in new ideas from outside the area, industry, or organization.
But how can you effectively manage the process of getting outside ideas into your organization?
1. Look for experts and industries that share some similarities:
The best place to jump off any effort to expand the universe of ideas you have access to is by looking for experts in areas that are very similar to what you are already doing.
In my experience, the jump from entertainment marketing wasn’t huge to museums and sports because ultimately you are still focusing largely on experience. And, once I started my own business within the sports and ticket industry, the jump to working with clients on business to business marketing and selling was simple because I knew how to make partnership deals.
What would be a similar situation for you and your team?
2. Understand that ideas and solutions don’t need to be perfect:
If we aren’t careful, we can get caught up in a situation where we feel like we have to have a perfect solution or the one true idea that will solve everything.
Unfortunately, most of the time, life doesn’t work that way.
This is especially true when you are dealing with the kinds of new ideas that are likely to be generated by an outside perspective.
Understanding that solutions and ideas don’t need to be perfect, can be the first step in the right direction of getting your team focused on application and not perfection.
3. Make it a challenge to find the most abstract idea:
Bringing in new ideas can be scary. I get that.
But one of the challenges you have to fight is that you try to force your team to skew their thinking too closely to what you have been doing in the past.
One way to overcome that is by making your team or yourself have a contest within the organization to come up with the idea that is most abstract and unlike anything you are currently doing.
It doesn’t mean that you have to really implement it, but it might be useful as a way to break the logjam of group think that has put you into a situation where you are struggling to generate new ideas.
In the end, the big deal is to bring new ideas into your organization constantly. How or where they come from shouldn’t be concerning because none of us have the market cornered on all the ideas.