There are lots of ways to solve problems. Troubleshooting is one of them. Troubleshooting is used to diagnosis the source of a problem. Â So to me, troubleshooting is the best way to solve a problem. Â My process of troubleshooting is easy to understand. The goal is to always give yourself a limited number of options to choose to determine what’s going on (typically 2). Â If the problem is reconfiguring email or why marketing efforts aren’t working, you can do the same thing. Â Let’s walk through an example. You try a new marketing idea and while you feel it should be effective, you aren’t seeing the results. Â To troubleshoot it you need to get to the cause. Â In the case of a marketing idea, it could be the content, it could be the medium or it could be the audience. From there you can survey people […] Continue reading
Actually Thinking Outside the Box
Had a couple interesting experiences in the last couple days regarding thinking outside the box. Â The first, I’m happy to say, I started. Â I needed an exercise to help students recognize that the work world is different. Â I took 17 random shapes in a variety of colors and put them on an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. Â Then each group was given crayons. Â One person from each group could come up and look at the paper for 30 seconds and draw for one minute. Â This would happen 4 times. Â On the third round I actually swapped out the drawing for something slightly different (shapes were moved and colors changed). The students all came up, looked at the page and tried to memorize it, and then went back to draw. Â When we finished the time, I asked why no one had brought up their phone […] Continue reading
You Are Traffic
I saw a picture awhile ago of a bike rack and the caption read, “You aren’t stuck in traffic. You are traffic.” How awesome is that? And that’s something I think we all fall into. Things happen and we take no responsibility for them even though our actions help to cause them. What do you mean, Kath? Well, let’s say you are frustrated that your employees don’t innovate enough. Rather than look at it for the seven hundredth time as how to “fix” the employees, take a look at yourself. Do you always come up with a bunch of ideas? Is it possible your employees feel like they don’t have to because you will? Or, if they do come up with ideas, do you always have a better one? (I worked for her – it wasn’t her fault, she really did have better ideas. But […] Continue reading