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Wednesday, July 9, 2008

25 Ways to Change Your Character

Nearly every week since the start of the year, the Wednesday feature has been “Change Your Character,” a great technique to generate new ideas by delegating a challenge to someone who you wouldn’t typically think about selecting to do your work. This lateral thinking approach uses someone in a completely different line of work to help you look at your own situation with a fresh perspective.

As a refresher, here are the steps:

  1. State the business challenge that you’re addressing – it could be an opportunity, a problem, a new process or approach, etc.
  2. Pick who you want to work on your situation. This could be a real person, a fictional or cartoon character, or even another business that faces an analogous situation.
  3. Once you’ve identified who you’ll put on the job, list 8 to 10 approaches that the person, character, or business uses to address opportunities or challenges.
  4. Using the 8 to 10 approaches, apply them to your situation to generate at least 3 new ideas each for solving it.

The Wednesday feature does steps 2 and 3, allowing you to focus primarily on step 4 – idea generation. As the weekly feature moves to less frequent appearances, here’s a handy summary of the 25 columns that you can bookmark for use in successfully addressing future opportunities. Within each category, the situations and characters covered are listed, along with a link to the original article.

Strategy

Relationship & Brand Building

Team Building

Management & Problem Solving

Professional Skills

Just a note - I used Bart Simpson recently, and it worked very well. Give it a try and have great success Changing Your Character!

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