All the Hardest People to Collaborate With, All in One Place
One too many Zoom meetings spent looking at so many challenging colleagues prompted Brainzooming to create the Worst Online Meeting Hall of Fame. It’s a celebration, so to speak, of the interesting personalities we all recognize who slow down new thinking, effective collaboration, and turning ideas into business results.
While each of these characters has their own unique personality profiles, they do fall into organic groupings. So partly in an effort to help you manage this motley crew and lead them toward greater productivity, we designed the Blast! online collaboration experience. It provides an environment that accommodates everyone—even those, er, hall-of-famers—so that everyone can become a productive meeting participant!
The WOMHOF (and the Blast! Antidotes)
How many of these challenging executives are you dealing with among your team? And where might Blast! help you accelerate progress and results with your cast of characters?
"Highway to the Comfort Zone"
Their Challenge: These executives operate and maneuver based on their history in the field. They can pull from a storehouse of experiences to warn off the rest of the team about trying something new.
The Blast! Antidote: Include questions about the ideas that people already have, or what’s been tried and hasn’t worked, but might this time? This provides the space to bring forward past ideas and beliefs that people hold dear while leaving space for everyone to innovate!
The Hammers
Their Challenge: When you’re dealing with an executive whose power move revolves around the ability to say no and grind everything to a halt, what do you suppose they do in an innovation strategy? That’s right: they kill ideas—unless carefully courted and allowed to shape the idea until it’s to their liking.
The Blast! Antidote: Take advantage of a shared success exercise within Blast! to get these difficult characters on the record ASAP with their expectations. Checking on expectations, decision factors, and how they think about success lets you create a scorecard upfront for evaluating and prioritizing ideas.
What a Drag
Their Challenge: Some people can’t help themselves: they move immediately toward finding flaws and problems with any new strategy or idea. That can be a really helpful skill, but it needs to be deployed at the right time and situation, which is not when ideas are first coming to life.
The Blast! Antidote: Have them focus on exercises where critical thinking is tremendously important, such as identifying critical success factors or going deep to understand internal or customer pain points so they can be prioritized and fixed.
Stodgy, Stodgier, Stodgiest
Their Challenge: Having to think too much, too fast, or too hard causes the stodgy ones in a meeting to shut down (at best) or shoot down (at worst) anyone else who is thinking innovatively and imagining all kinds of new possibilities. They’d rather sit back and think by themselves outside the meeting where they feel safer.
The Blast! Antidote: For the people who want more time to think, review, and react to ideas, we have Orbit. It’s a twenty-four hour window that follows any thirty-minute Blast!, during which participants can review everything on their own time, at their own pace, and comment on all the ideas. Heck, they may even take advantage of the anonymity and solo time to contribute a few ideas of their own!
The Avoidant Ones
Their Challenge: We all know those people who are 100% about ideas and not at all into contributing time and effort to turn those ideas into reality. After the initial ideation phase, they go MIA to avoid having to turn ideas into implementation and results.
The Blast! Antidote: With Blast! you can quickly imagine ideas and quickly imagine how to move them forward. With a focus on planning and implementation questions you can take advantage of all the ideas the hard work avoiders are willing to share without losing them to the “urgent” things keeping them from contributing.
The Pushy Ones
Their Challenge: Every company has its big thinkers who are pushing for new and bigger ideas. And when everyone else is struggling to keep up with breakthrough thinking, the frustration can become palpable.
The Blast! Antidote: The best way to generate ideas with the potential to be big? Have a diverse group generate a ton of ideas very quickly by presenting blue-sky thinking along with tighter constraints. You’ll be amazed at the way conventional thinkers are able to stretch their thinking! This is why Blast! is the big creative thinker’s best friend for pushing incredible ideas with all fun and no frustration.
The Tricky Ones
Their Challenge: Whether based on personality, position, or preference (or all three), this group built their careers on being difficult to read, reach, or rely on for constructive input. Put them all into the same meeting, and it’s as if the floor becomes quicksand.
The Blast! Antidote: It’s vital to reach out to the tricky ones before any group meeting to get a sense of what they think. That’s where your inside team can collaborate on Blast! to identify what you need to learn from each of these characters before any meeting ever begins.
The Outsiders
Their Challenge: Some people feel they don’t have anything to contribute, and so they must stay out of the strategy planning and innovation fray. The truth is that these people represent a valuable opportunity. Their fresh eyes can provide feedback and input that will be vastly different from that of the people who live and breathe strategy and innovation, potentially creating excellent new possibilities for your organization.
The Blast! Antidote: Blast! collaborations employ questions that are accessible to strategy experts and newbies alike. Plus, the opportunity to respond anonymously allows them to move from Switzerland and fire a few shots over the bows of other difficult thinkers.
