What we do when brainstorming stalls
We’ve all been in those brainstorming meetings where it's easier to hear a pin drop than colleagues shouting out ideas. Many people struggle in these scenarios because they’re not sure where to start. For most of us, it’s more comfortable to let a colleague be the first to throw out a new idea rather than embrace the vulnerability of proposing an idea that others may not fully understand at the outset.
As an operations leader, one of my responsibilities was to brainstorm and test new ways to ensure business units were proactively reaching out to prospective and existing students. What strategies should we use to better engage students? How often should we reach out? Wouldn’t it just be easier if students would simply reach out to us first? This common problem of not knowing when and where to start in the brainstorming process infiltrates many facets of our professional lives. It is also where the Student Engagement Framework, and specifically the Student Contact Strategy and Tactical Work Cycle components, can assist leaders with a starting point to impactful new ideas.
Instead of brainstorming what you should do, start by documenting and detailing the activities and strategies employed currently. It’s hard to know how to get to where you want to go when you don’t know where you are. Documenting and categorizing your existing strategies provides everyone involved with solid footing and awareness of the current state. (It is also a precursor to Operational Excellence and Governance). Once you’ve documented each contact event being performed, the communication channel used, and the frequency of contact, you may start to identify areas of overlap in your contact strategies, gaps where contacts have gone too long, and a host of other areas to improve. When you review these areas with stakeholders, brainstorming challenges becomes markedly easier. Brainstorming isn’t just about big, bold, audacious ideas. It’s about incremental tweaks that cause a ripple effect of change. When people feel safe by starting out small, the ball starts rolling, picking up speed, momentum, and the mass needed to generate meaningful ideas.
Once you’ve brainstormed and collected all the strategies employed in your current state, you need to validate whether your strategies are being executed with the expected quality. In the Student Engagement Framework, we utilize the Tactical Work Cycle. The Tactical Work Cycle provides awareness of the work currently being generated and completed, and validates that work has been completed within your quality parameters. You may have systems that automate the delivery of work with completion status, but developing processes to collect and validate that work has been completed with quality is critical even in an automated state. There is a case to be made that automation increases the need for the Tactical Work Cycle as there are many scenarios where a department thinks they have automated work only to find months later that the work they believed was being performed has not actually been completed.
The Student Engagement Framework is a living repository of your department’s engagement strategies and tactics. Once your current state is documented, it is easier to brainstorm new ideas, entertain Feedback, and perform Operational Excellence & Governance to develop a true cycle of continuous improvement.
The next time you find yourself in a brainstorming session for operational improvements, think about the process of documenting your current strategies and tactics first! Better yet, you can reach out to Metavasi Partners through our request form and leverage our complimentary performance diagnostic. We are passionate about developing processes and systems that help institutions improve!
