Truly stretching people’s minds to think beyond the day to day restrictions they consider relevant to their business can be oth uplifting, and dreadfully hard work.

Whether working with creative people or accountants the ratio of those who want to spread their wings and fly, to those who really don’t want to think doesn’t actually change much, though teams that are closer to mathematics definitely seem to be more creative minded. Still, whoever they are I spend some time helping them realise that creating might come more naturally to some of us, but in fact most of us are more than able to generate ideas, the most important thing is to actually want to.

Just writing that reminded me that I used to give my teams copies of the book by James Young on the subject – I’ve made his name into a link to the book on Amazon if you’re interested in buying it. Shocking really, I don’t know where my own copy is now.

The ideas phase is to stretch their imagination – how might that apply to ForEx? Blimey? I haven’t a clue yet, but it’s their job to do the thinking, I’m there to help them get started.

We should get to this stage at the end of the first day, but not too late – say three o’clock, before their enthusiasm starts to wane.

At three I’ll run a short presentation with quotes and photos from the day to recap on what we’ve discussed, then next morning we’ll do a similar recap but with them talking it through with each other.

Next up we refine the ideas until we have three (four at the outside) potential propositions that we’ll work at to determine what pushes us a long way beyond the competition, but that we could actually deliver.

Wow! It all sounds so possible just typing it out like this. Actually running the sessions is a whole lot harder. I’ll be exhausted. I’ll try to do it on a Tuesday and Wednesday then take a long weekend.

I mentioned a few days back that I had a call from our ForEx business leader wanting me to look at doing some propositions work with his team.

I’m thinking onto paper here in order to get a few ideas down. Do bear with me.

I’ll be talking to the business team of ten or so people, they’re the software guys, the salesmen, the help desk and there’s a copywriter. We’ll also have four clients from right across the spectrum. One guy is from a pensions giant and sometimes trades a million dollars in a day, while one describes himself as a hobby trader and is dealing in his own money. Despite that he’s still trading thousands of dollars a couple of times a month – it’s sobering looking at such wealth. The other two are brokers working on behalf of clients.

I need to inspire them to talk about their business, the boundaries they work within, and the potential effects of breaking through those boundaries.

What do they offer that’s any different to anyone else? I have the horrible suspicion that they’ll say it’s a commoditised market and what they do is the same as what the next company does.

Whether they do think that’s the case or not doesn’t really matter as next up we’ll start looking at the business from a customer perspective. This deliberately follows what the business offers as otherwise you’ll try to fit the business offering to the customer, justifying stuff from a customer perspective even when there’s absolutely no customer relevance to a practice.

The clients are vital here, but also I’ll pull in a couple of people to talk about completely different sectors. I have a good friend at Wholefoods Market who will blow these guys away, and I have a used car dealer who customers say they’d prefer to go back to than buy a new car as the experience he delivers is so excellent.

Part of the reason for the customer stage is to consider other markets and what constitutes great to help the guys realise that great is often a long way from what they’re doing.

This is helping me prepare so much better than when I usually just write a few notes on a big sheet of paper. I have to get back to the grind now but I’ll do more of this thinking on paper.