CPA Trendlines

A few simple rules can guarantee success.

by Rick Telberg

Creativity is a management issue. Indeed, it must be when it can lead to new ideas that push businesses forward and increase productivity and profitability.

The kind of creativity that leads to those gains for organizations and clients can be taught, nurtured and enhanced, or, in other words, managed. Creative problem solving is not limited to “creative types.” Any firm or department that wants to leap forward, innovate or simply refresh their energy after busy season can benefit from the techniques.Indeed, CPAs and finance managers do a lot of creative brainstorming already, although it is routinely done in a casual, off-hand way in between meetings or after work. Smart managers know how to harness that energy to produce real, actionable results.

Here’s an eight-step plan that often works with otherwise jaded professionals. Feel free to customize it for your group.

1. Be Inclusive: For departmental sessions, invite people from other departments or even board members. Perhaps they have faced the same kinds of issues your department is facing and know of applicable technologies or other approaches.

2. Be Prepared: At least two days in advance, notify all the participants of the purpose of your brainstorming session, and ask them to come ready with one or two ideas. You may have to set the tone, so be equally prepared with your own ideas.

3. Be Engaging: Give your sessions titles that are stimulating and fun, rather than ominous or boring. For example, a session title such as “We are at a million in sales. How do we reach a billion?,” is better than “Improving services” or “Beating the competition.” Or for nonprofits, “How can we work so badly that we lose all the current funding?” is better than “In what ways could the government shift their strategies that would really harm us?”

4. Fuel the Fire: Provide munchies and drinks at the sessions. The profits from one good idea should more than recover the cost of some bagels and doughnuts.

5. Fuel the Mind: Use a whiteboard or flipchart to keep the attendees’ minds focused on the issues at hand. Assign a note taker to write everything in front of everyone. To enhance each others’ ideas, use sketches or drawings, such as a stick man, color coding, arrows, triangles, stars and crooked lines to connect the thoughts as they pop up.

6. Defer Judgment: Do not stop at each idea to evaluate it or to announce, “We don’t have enough money or staff for that.” Fear of such on-the-spot rejection can stifle thinking. And don’t stop when you feel you’ve reached a good solution because a better one might come in the next few minutes. Brainstorming is in fact “storming.” Keep running until you reach a dead-end or your time expires. Write down everything and then search for the nuggets among them.

7. Follow Up: Type up the notes and share them with the team and, perhaps, some people who weren’t part of the meeting. Invite each to add three more ideas.

8. Elaborate and Improve: Connect two or more ideas to create a combined one, and be willing to modify a plan by looking at it from the perspectives of others such as other departments, clients, board members and, for nonprofits, your funding sources.

In addition to improving profits and operations, bringing brainstorming to a higher level should also make the organization a place where good people want to join and stay.

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[First published by the AICPA]

Posted July 29, 2007
Related Topics: growth strategy