At Distility, we believe that the best brands are the result of real commitment by an organization’s people to a brand’s promise, position and personality and to the brand systems representing that brand. We do this through Distility 1day1brand which we developed to combine best practices in collaborative decision making and best practices in branding. In fact, our innovations are the subject of patent applications under the catchy title “Method for Visualizing the Collective Opinion of a Group”. Consequently, collaboration enhancements and best practices are often on our minds.

This post shares three of our tips to improve your team’s collaboration and key takeaways from two pieces on the pitfalls of traditional group brainstorming session. We caution that, unlike the two pieces distilled below, we still see value in brainstorming as a tool but we advocate an enhanced brainstorming approach (equivalent to a brainstorming 5.0 as opposed to the less effective brainstorming 1.0).

3 Tips to Improve Collaboration

While great collaboration is often the result of many factors, here are three things that have been shown to enhance innovation and creative output.

1. Physical proximity and interaction has been shown to be an important aspect of true innovative breakthroughs. This is a big reason that we hold our brand strategy sessions as an in-person workshop.
2. Brainstorming is only one idea generation approach. Even enhanced brainstorming 5.0 should only be one tool in your collaboration toolkit. Brainstorming works best when people have some quiet time to come up with ideas and then have the group share, evaluate and discuss ideas. While creative tension is important, it is important not to squash input and idea generation. At Distility in our workshops, we focus on promotion of good ideas (instead of focusing on killing bad ideas).
3. Groups can get stale. Bringing in an outside facilitator with their own domain expertise to work with a cross-functional team from your organization can make a dramatic difference. An outside facilitator also frees up your team members to more fully participate and not have to act as de facto facilitator.

Key Ingredients to Successful Collaboration and Innovation

The recent article “Groupthink, the Brainstorming Myth” by Jonah Lehrer in the January 30, 2012 edition of the New Yorker and the older PsyBlog post Brainstorming Reloaded provide insights into how to foster successful collaboration. While neither piece provide the magic bullet to use to kill Groupthink and other collaborative decision making pathologies, there are some useful takeaways which we have summarized below.

From the article “Groupthink, the Brainstorming Myth”, there are four key takeaways:

1. Brainstorming is well known approach to generating ideas and problem solving.  Alex Osborn of the B.B.D.O. advertising agency first described the brainstorming approach in his 1948 book, “Your Creative Power”. While it is still a really popular approach, empirical studies have actually found that a group brainstorming ideas is less effective than one person working alone. It turns out that there needs to be a certain amount of creative tension, criticism or different perspectives for groups to be at their creative best.
2. The brainstorming edict to not criticize brainstormed ideas may actually work against creativity and innovation.  The author notes that: “Criticism allows people to dig below the surface of the imagination and come up with collective ideas that aren’t predictable.”
3. Research has shown that creative teams can be too familiar and get stale once they have worked together for too long. Collaboration can be enhanced when a team includes new members (or facilitators), people from different disciplines and with different backgrounds.
4. Physical spaces can help foster creative friction and sparks of insight. Amazing innovations have resulted from spontaneous and repeated interactions between people from disparate fields. To make this happen, physical proximity can act like a “magical incubator” for ideas.

The PsyBlog post Brainstorming Reloaded notes that “[e]xperiment after experiment has shown that people in brainstorming sessions produce fewer and lower quality ideas than those working alone” and summarizes the poor brainstorming results as a result of:

• social loafing (slacking off in group situations),
• evaluation apprehension (ultimately people realize that their ideas will be scrutinized), and
• production blocking (while one participant is talking or sharing their ideas, other participants must wait and stop producing ideas).

PsyBlog suggests some ways to improve brainstorming sessions. The two key ideas are that:

1. Group collaboration will be enhanced if participants prepare ideas in advance;
2. The best use of group time is in evaluation and discussion of ideas, rather than initial idea generation.

The post was published on Distility® blog at Collaboration, Innovation and Branding: Is Brainstorming Effective?.

Best of Brand Marketing Distilled is our weekly (and sometime less frequent) distillation of the best of brand marketing and business intelligence. We hope these posts are fuel for your organization’s planning and success.   This week’s edition provides a distillation of our top workshop and off-site space rental tips.  We have rented many workshop spaces over the years as the venue for delivering Distility 1day1brand workshops to our customers, and we have learned a number of lessons along the way.  We hope this distillation will assist you with your next workshop, corporate retreat or off-site venue rental adventure.

1.  What do you need in a workshop event rental location?

Before you start your search, make calls, or send emails, you should determine what you need.  Your needs may be straight-forward if you are looking for space for 25 people to meet in an empty room or boardroom setting, you have no audio visual requirements, you will serve minimal non-alcoholic beverages and you don’t plan to serve any food.  However, you will likely need more than that.

For our workshops, we have detailed specifications based on our needs, including overall square footage and dimensions for the space, wall colour or screen availability, furniture set-up options, ability to set up our own equipment, Internet, number of participants and food and beverage requirements.

Once you have a reasonably good sense of what you need, then you can search and reach out to potential venues to find out if they have a space that fits your needs.

2. When do you need it?

There is no need to figure out if the space meets your needs if it isn’t available when you need it.

We suggest that one of your initial filter questions is about availability on you desired dates.  If it is available, then ask a promisingly looking venue to hold the space for you while you decide if you will book it.  There should be no charge to hold the venue, but be forewarned that, if your booking is challenged by a competing renter for your date, you can expect to have to book or release it within 24 hours.

3. How much will it cost and what will you get for your money?

The quoted rental rate for the space is rarely the entire cost.  Actually, in our experience it never is.

To get to the full details of the cost, you need the Rental Agreement (sometimes called the License Agreement), any standard terms and a detailed estimate from the venue. Getting the Rental Agreement and the detailed estimate should not be an afterthought.  Space rental agreements are not all the same, and looking at the agreement and the estimate is the only way to be sure there are no unexpected costs.   A key (and perhaps common sense) lesson is that it is essential to get both the agreement and the detailed estimate before you commit to a space and before you confirm the date and location with your team or customer.

You should also make sure that the workshop event rental location agreement (including any standard terms) make sense for your event.  In addition, you should not be shy about asking for reasonable changes to the agreement (including the standard terms) before you sign or send your deposit cheque. We generally find that venues are open to making reasonable changes to approve our putting up Distility signage, bringing in our workshop equipment and addressing our concerns.

You should also beware that some spaces may be less expensive since you are bearing more risk or have to rent everything needed to use the space (furniture, linens, venue staff to obtain access, and more).  In addition, for some spaces, like Universities renting out their lecture halls, the agreement may include a clause that they can cancel your booking in favour of one of its own events; you will likely want that term deleted or not rent that space to avoid risk of losing your event space.

Questions to ask before renting a workshop event location

The following is a list of some of the questions which we suggest asking to help avoid surprises, zero in on the end costs and make informed choices.

Rent

• What is the rent for the space? For that rent, what is the time period that we get access to the space, including set up and tear down time?
• If our daytime event will runs past 5 p.m., can we book by the hour or do we have to book the entire evening?  What is the charge?  Will this impact food and beverage and staffing charges (see below)?
• If the space is not rented, can we set up the night before?  Will there be a charge? If not, can we have our equipment delivered to the venue the day before, is there a secure space for our equipment to be stored and how early on the day of our event can we have access to the space to set up?
• What furniture is part of the basic rent?  Does a furniture or linen rental charge need to be paid?  Is room set-up by venue staff included in the rental rate?
• What Internet connectivity is available?  Is it included in the rent or an extra charge?  If Internet is essential for your event, consider obtaining a dedicated quality connection for your event and ask how much that will cost.
• What venue staff services are included in the rent?  Are there any other required staffing for our event and what is the cost?

Food and Drink

• For food and drink, can we use any caterer? Or does the caterer have to be from the venue’s preferred caterer list? Whether there is a preferred caterer list or not, you are well advised to get a basic catering quote before you commit to the venue.
• Does the caterer or venue have a minimum food and beverage requirement, and, if so, what is it?  The minimum can be very high – especially if your event includes both day and evening space rental.
• Does the venue charge a landmark fee on food and beverage (a fixed % on top of your catering bill)?  A landmark fee is not uncommon, and can make sense where the venue provides amenities to support the catering.
• Does the venue provide a standard set of linens, plates, dishes, etc. Or does the caterer rent (and charge for these)?  The rental of these items can be surprisingly pricey.
• You should ask about the full catering costs and not simply the food and beverage costs.  Strangely, for some events, the actual food charges are smaller than the costs of rentals, staff and delivery charges.  Caterer costs may include the costs of a food and beverage staff member being present for your entire event (or for a specified a minimum amount of time), even if they are simply dropping off and setting up sandwiches for your guests.  For large events, this can assist ensuring that all goes smoothly, but it can be a big per person cost for smaller groups.
• Liquor licenses vary from venue to venue.  The end result is that for some venues, you end up having to add additional serving staff person if you plan to serve alcohol.  In some venues, the additional cost of a champagne toast to end off an event is the cost of the champagne and, in other venues, it is the cost of the champagne plus hefty additional costs, including a separate server for 4 hours and additional glassware rentals.

The post was published on Distility® blog at Best of Brand Marketing Distilled – 12/9/11 – Event Space Rental Tips.

Best of Brand Marketing Distilled is our weekly distillation of the best of brand marketing and business intelligence. We hope the ideas and articles are fuel for your organization’s planning and success.  This Remembrance Day our edition focuses on Random Acts of Kindness.
On a personal level, this Remembrance Day feels auspicious and numerologically significant with its triple elevens – 11/11/11.  To mark it, engaging in Random Acts of Kindness seems fitting.  However, brand teams may want to take it to the next level and build Random Acts of Kindness into their brand experience — not as a hollow marketing device — but using Random Acts of Kindness as an authentic expression of the humans that make up the underlying business.  If your team is kind and compassionate, consider whether now is the time to infuse the ethos of Random Acts of Kindness into your brand experience.  Genuine Random Acts of Kindness allow a brand to connect with customers and inspire the brand’s team.  However, to be genuine it has to be (i) about doing something that is authentic and not fake and (ii) it must not simply be a thinly veiled sales pitch or endorsement request.

“Random Acts of Kindness” Why kind, human brands will thrive in a connected economy by @trendwatching
Trend Watching piece from the Spring of 2011 noting the trend that many customers are:

• “[d]isgusted with big, arrogant, sloppy and out of touch institutions, fed-up consumers around the world increasingly expect businesses to be socially, ethically and environmentally responsible”, and
• brands can enhance the brand experience for customers if they do a good job adding a human kind touch to their customer engagement.

The piece provides tips on how your brand can engage in Random Acts of Kindness. Two key tip included are:

1. “Be genuine. R.A.K. should demonstrate a brand’s attitude, not be a (temporarily) welcome exception to it. Any cold-hearted, stuck-in-the-past brand who thinks it can fake it will be unmasked in today’s transparent marketplace. And the backlash won’t be random.”
2. “Don’t intrude, or be pushy, or sell. This isn’t about you or your brand, it’s about the recipient.”

The Random Acts of Kindness Foundation

The Random Acts of Kindness Foundation bills its website as a “resource for people committed to spreading kindness”. The  website shares stories and provides “kindness” resources.  It focuses on the small things that help foster a connected and kind world.  While Random Acts of Kindness could be grand gestures, the real essence of the idea is the little things that build a kinder gentler society.

The post was published on Distility® blog at Best of Brand Marketing Distilled – 11/11/11 – Random Acts of Kindness.

Best of Brand Marketing Distilled is our weekly distillation of the best of brand marketing and business intelligence. We hope the ideas and articles are fuel for your organization’s planning and success.

This week we offer a distillation of the expert client divide, content considerations for inbound marketing, the potential power of social media and strategy integration.

• Stupid, Stupid Client: Getting Past the Expert Blindspot in Design

Clever piece by Jon Kolko in UX Magazine on experts losing their client in the weeds of the decision making process.  To avoid a frustratingly iterative process for the expert and, importantly, for the expert’s client, then the expert needs to make sure their client understands the implications of design forks and how the decisions will impact the ultimate design.

• Eloqua Infographic: The Content Grid v.2

Inbound marketing focuses on having prospects find a business and then close sales from those prospects.   The Eloqua Infographic Content Grid catalogues the types of content which are the bread and butter of inbound marketing efforts.  What sets this graphic apart is that it provides a simple breakdown of what types of content interest prospects at each of the awareness, consideration and close stage of the buying process.  The breakdown is a good reminder to ensure inbound marketing efforts don’t focus only on one type of content and ensure there is content which appeals to prospects at each stage of the buying process.

•  What Social-Media Marketers Could Learn From Broadway

Ad Age piece on the power of peer recommendations (or in the Broadway context the ‘You’ve Got to See It’ Factor”) and how social media is a breakthrough opportunity for brands to leverage peer influence.

• Fast Company: In Social Media, Failing to Plan Is Planning to Fail

This piece considers how social media is essentially channels and networks to communicate information. The interesting further point made is that most businesses are missing out on opportunities to use social media to their maximum benefit since social media has been relegated for use by marketing, customer service (and in some instances human resources) only, and the opportunities to use social media in other aspects of business to further integration and collaboration are being overlooked.  The excellent example in the piece is how ridiculous it would be if email was introduced today and only used for marketing and not by all employees.

This Week’s Top Distility Rebranding Branding Content

• The Perils of Business and Brand Strategy Silos

Integrating your business strategy and your brand strategy decisions allows you to avoid being forced to use your resources on damage control for your brand.

The post was published on Distility® blog at Best of Brand Marketing Distilled – 09/09/2011.

There are far too many examples of businesses being forced into damage control mode after decisions on business policies, actions or tactics blow up in their faces. In the internet age, it is wise to assume that there are no secrets from your customers and stakeholders.  You need to consider not only how your decisions fit within your overall business strategy but also:(i) how they fit within your brand strategy and (ii) how decision will be perceived by your customer and stakeholders.  Consider the damage caused by:

• A newspaper deciding to secretly tap the phones of victims, celebrities and other news story targets.
• A trendy fashion brand deciding to obtain designs by stealing them from small, unknown artists.
• A packaged food brand deciding to lower the salt in its products, market the change massively as a health benefit for its customers, and then when sales flag, revert to original salty formulation.
• A U.S. retailer deciding to charge higher prices in its new Canadian stores, having its Canadian launch mired by angry customers and then retreating, apologizing and altering pricing policy to be in line with U.S. stores and website.

• An online gaming network finding its customer private data hacked, having to shut down its network and later revealing a delay between discovering the customer data theft and its disclosure of the theft.

The wisest organizations have learned about the importance of integrating “brand strategy” and “business strategy” and take great pains not to silo these functions. To set the stage for wise decisions, ensure that:

• Your lead team is involved in both business strategy and brand strategy.
• Development of business strategy and brand strategy are connected.
• Your business strategy and brand strategy (promise, position, personality) are presented in a way that is easy for your entire team to understand from fresh faced intern to CEO.
• Your team keeps your business strategy, brand strategy and your customer in mind when making decisions on policies, actions and tactics.

Case in point, one of our clients — one of the largest pharmaceutical services companies in Canada — followed up their three day annual business strategy off-site with a Distility 1day1brand event in Toronto. They completed the week united at both the business and brand strategy level. They distilled their strategies down to short documents (including their Distility 1Page Brand Strategy) that were easy to communicate to the entire team.

Integrating your strategies and communicating them to your entire team will allow you to avoid being thrust into damage control mode, alienating your target customer and hurting your business. Even better, it will make you a more aligned, authentic, successful business.

The post was published on Distility® blog at The Perils of Business and Brand Strategy Silos.