Category: Technology trends

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Re-energizing your brainstorming sessions

What meeting?

What meeting?

Wonder why your brainstorming sessions are a bust? Mitch Ditkoff (Ideachampions) gives us some of the most common reasons:

  1. Poor facilitation
  2. Wrong (or poorly articulated) topic
  3. Unmotivated participants
  4. Insufficient diversity of participants
  5. Inadequate orientation
  6. No transition from “business as usual”
  7. Lack of clear ground rules
  8. Sterile meeting space
  9. Hidden (or competing) agendas
  10. Lack of robust participation
  11. Insufficient listening
  12. Habitual idea killing behavior
  13. Attachment to old (“pet”) ideas
  14. Discomfort with ambiguity
  15. Hyper-seriousness (not enough fun)
  16. Endless interruptions
  17. PDA addiction (Crackberries)
  18. Impatience (premature adoption of the first “right idea”)
  19. Group think
  20. Hierarchy and/or competing sub-groups
  21. Imbalance of divergent and convergent thinking
  22. No tools and techniques to spark the imagination
  23. Inelegant ways of capturing new ideas
  24. No time for personal reflection
  25. Pre-mature evaluation
  26. No follow-up plan

Now that you’ve finished nodding your head 26 times, check out some of the excellent advice to make your next brainstorming session a success. 26 Reasons Why Most Brainstorming Session Fail (and what to do about it)

Information Overload Syndrome

Some depressing facts (IDC survey):

  • Each year the amount of information created in the enterprise, paper and digital combined, grows faster than 65%.
  • Non-productive information work, such as reformatting documents or reentering documents into computers, consumed more than $1.5 trillion in U.S. salaries last year.
  • Survey respondents spend as much as 26% of their time trying to manage information overload.
  • Respondents split their time evenly between dealing with paper and digital information, but 71% prefer to deal with digital information.
  • The amount of time U.S. information workers spent last year managing paper-driven information overload cost $460 billion in salaries.
  • Reducing the time wasted dealing with information overload by 15% could save a company with 500 employees more than $2 million a year.

Source: IDC survey, Information Overload Site

And more serious:

  • 28% – The percentage of the typical workday wasted by interruptions caused by unnecessary information
  • 53% – The percentage of people who believe that less than half of the information they receive is valuable
  • 42% – The percentage of people who accidentally use the wrong information at least once per week

So what is IOS? Watch this video!

Get out of your cubicle

I love design and architecture.

Many of us spend most of our working hours in offices that were designed in the 1970’s.  But we don’t need to. Check out officesnapshots.com and laze away a while checking out the digs of all your favourite companies. The tech companies, advertising firms, innovation groups and every stripe in-between.

Dream and enjoy.  And don’t forget to check out the nutrition stations, meeting rooms and fun spaces.

One of the really, on the edge ones, is the offices of Selgas Cano in Madrid.

Offices of Selga Cano - Officesnapshots.com

Offices of Selgas Cano - Officesnapshots.com

So how does your office rate?

Why do companies fear social media?

How often have you heard this:

Social media makes listening easier. But listening is scary because we might not like what we hear.”

Ethan Yarbrough explores the topic of social media and says its better to be engage in the conversation because it is happening whether you are there or not What do you tell a company that fears social media.

If you really want to listen, then you need to be prepared for what your customers and employees are going to say. You might not be able to deliver what they want but you are able to meet them on their turf.