The best ideas are the crazy ones.

Ben from the post said…

”Don’t be afraid to suggest crazy ideas, because it helps lead other people to have more realistic, but great ones”.

He’s right – no one knows where this “wild” thought will lead to.

In one of my previous roles, I had a Sales Person suggest to me that we get a branded double-decker bus, that we drive up and down the country, and invite potential customers into, for some food and to showcase our product.

I loved his “crazy” idea, but deep down, I knew there was no way we would get approval to purchase a branded double-decker bus. Budgetary restrictions being the main obstacle, but also complications around insurance, upkeep and storage.

However I brought his suggestion to my colleagues in Marketing, as well as the CMO, and that idea turned into a series of breakfast roadshows”, in select venues up and down the country. These roadshows proved to be a huge success: built awareness, gave us some personality and generated a huge number of leads for the company.

So not only did a somewhat “crazy” idea turn into something very successful, it also originally came from someone who was in a completely different department.

All too often, people fear asking questions or sharing information, for fear of coming across as weak or silly, or back off because they feel it’s not their place to make a suggestion.

If you begin with the assumption that everyone’s answer will be no, if you limit yourself to planning around limitations you’ve had in the past, you’re closing a lot of doors for yourself, your team, and any clients you may serve.

Staff should be able to break the mould, and challenge the “oh we’ve always done it this way” barriers, and bring fresh, exciting (and crazy) ideas to the table.

Companies need to ensure that their culture is an open one, and one that accepts all types of ideas from everyone. They also need to ensure they put the right tools in the hands of their employees, in order to facilitate and enhance idea sharing– by making it easy as possible to share ideas and information with others.

Simple things such as a clipboard and markers, or whiteboards still make it easy to get what’s in our head out into the open. We humans will never stop trying to make sense of an idea by giving it some sort of visual form.

But nowadays, more often than not, ‘what’s in our head’ is usually ‘what’s on our screen’ with computing devices becoming a quasi-extension of ourselves in terms of screenshots, videos we’ve bookmarked, sites we’ve visited, documents we’ve saved. Today our screens are almost like a scrapbook or digital record of our thoughts and intent and it’s crucial that we have an easy way of sharing that scrapbook with others. One such tool is a wireless presentation system.

Wireless presentation solutions allow anyone to walk into a meeting space, and wirelessly share (crazy) ideas to the main screen, and also to other connected devices. Some allow two-way annotation, video-conferencing capabilities, and even have an interactive whiteboard built-in.

Any organisation wants their workforce to be productive, and come up with new, great ideas. Too many barriers stand in the way of sharing what’s on our screen: different device types, wrong or lost cables, multiple networks. You need a solution that breaks down these barriers.