Broad Perspective, LLC was created in 2015 by Gert Garman and as you might suspect, encompasses a “broad” array of cool, creative ways of thinking differently to get better solutions. By using different creative problem solving processes, tools and behaviors I can help people come up with sharper ideas that can move the business needle. And broadening the perspective helps clients be able to not only look through a different lens, but also to think laterally and not just linearly. This is how teams are able to come up with new, better ideas to implement for their business. Gert and her team helps with this by facilitating a session that sets the teams up for success. Ways to do this include:
Challenging the challenge.
Many times clients think they know what the challenge is that they want to solve for. By doing a little digging, we can make sure that their challenges are in the right place so they are not trying to solve for world peace (although it would be nice if someone took that on!) nor are they still stuck in the weeds and get frustrated. We help with this because it is no fun to get six months down the road and realize that you’ve been working on the wrong challenge!
Basing solutions in real consumer insights.
Assumptions are not good to make when it comes to figuring out what your customer needs. You may think you know what they want and need, but do you really know? We can help with that too. Some larger clients have dedicated research teams but not everyone can afford this type of insight work. And even if they do have some of this, it’s very inspiring to bring a target customer to life to gain even more information. We have ways to do this as well. Anything from focus groups, panel discussions, pretending you are the customer to get experiential clues about them, to a human library of naïve experts that solve for similar challenges but are in a different industry. There are all kinds of ways to get “informed” insights that help come up with the right solutions. And, we know how to do this!
Diverging in small groups.
Coming up with ideas is easy for some, but by collaborating in smaller cross-disciplined groups and then reporting out to a bigger group to get buy-in works great! Smaller groups also allow the brilliant, but introverted folks on a team to be able to share the air and voice their thought starters. We strategically place groups together so that the speech makers (those who love the sound of their own voice) are mixed in with others so that they don’t dominate the conversation. Having the right people in the room can make or break a session. We will coach you to make sure that everyone from senior management to front line employees and some that are in-between are represented so that everyone has ownership in the solutions.
Converging and polishing.
Once all the ideas are presented, we encourage teams to then anonymously vote on which ones they love the most because they are passionate about them but they also make business sense. From there, we help teams start with those ideas with another set of tools to help them solidify and build these ideas to make them rich, robust and bullet proof before they run them up the flag pole for approval. The ideas that don’t get many votes don’t get thrown out. Some get collapsed into each other and some get stored because maybe the resources or timing are not right – right now, but that’s not to say they won’t be later on. This stage is so important and yet gets glossed over because people get excited about implementing but they have half-baked stuff to implement. We help teams build in the time to make sure this happens the way it should.
Action planning.
Once you have all of these sexy ideas, it is time to make a plan! And we can help with that as well. By identifying timelines, idea champions and resources needed, we help set clients up for success!
