In my last newsletter I told you that I was trying out new ways to create content. So that’s what I did. 

• I filmed one second every day of the month.
• I recorded a three-minute audio update every day for thirty days in March.
• Plus, I started to use Dragon Dictate to dictate new content instead of writing it.

So, how was it? Well, it was easy to remember to film one second per day, this came quite naturally to me. I filmed this content using an app called ‘1 Second Everyday’. It’s great, if you can get it. Here is the video on YouTube. 

It was harder to remember to record a three-minute audio update on Audioboo every day and sometimes I forgot to do one, but if that happened I would do a summary the next day about what had happened the day before.

My Dragon project was great fun and I’ve written over 20,000 words using the software. It does require a bit more editing in the beginning, but the flow is different when you speak out loud compared with writing.

Press release

Sofie Sandell was one of the speakers at Junior Chamber International UK’s national convention 22 November in Leeds. Her talk about digital leadership covered how organisations can better nurture new and innovative ideas. Often people say no to new ideas without realizing that they might just have killed something that could help them to overcome a problem or bring in new business.

Consumers are becoming more and more demanding and to stay in business companies must innovate. The new ideas that will lead to innovation are likely to involve new technology. If you fear technology you will be left behind.

Sofie also highlighted that companies need more digital savvy people on their boards to make better decisions about future digital investments.

In one of the case studies she mentioned how HMV, which was founded in 1921 in the UK used to be an innovative business, but then totally lost its ability to innovate. Amazon has been selling books online since 1994 yet HMV still does not have an e-commerce shop.

The biggest fear for all businesses should be getting left behind. One way to avoid that is to learn how to nurture new ideas. Often we judge an idea when it’s far too young and tiny; you need to involve more people and build on it to make ideas grow. She also pointed out that it’s a good idea to have both a formal and informal process to develop new ideas.

Five digital leadership tips: 

1. Great leaders are not just great communicators, but also great listeners. Learn to use the digital tools available and listen to your customers.
2. Be yourself online, your online profile must reflect who you are in normal life. It’s about building trust and being honest. We all have an OBD – an online bullshit detector and we feel immediately if something is not honest.
3. Integrate digital development into your strategy and plan at least one year ahead. Many businesses have a digital strategy that says what they want to do in the next month – which is a very short period. Then they wonder why their efforts won’t work for them.
4. Always learn and explore new digital techniques. Don’t wait for your competitors to show the way forward and then think you can copy best practice. It only means that they will always be ahead of you. To really learn how to do it you must do it yourself. It’s scary to get involved in digital development, but you must explore it.
5. The world wants leaders who can communicate both online and offline. You should use the digital tools to connect with people emotionally. That is when you can reach further.

Other speakers at the conference were Andy Clarke CEO of Asda, Greg Wright journalist at Yorkshire post, charisma coach Solveig Malvik, Leeds based business man Martin Allison and futurist Mike Ryan.

Some background information

Sofie Sandell was born in Gothenburg, Sweden, this is where Volvo and SKF have their headquarters. It’s an industrial city and 50% of Scandinavia’s industries can be found in a radius of 200 miles from Gothenburg. Sofie grew up with weekly news about businesses going bust, they could not manage the change.

The region around Gothenburg has many similarities to Yorkshire and what have happened there with its industry. Making people redundant and closing down factories and sites is depressing. To avoid that this will happen in the future everyone need to learn more how innovation and creativity works. Forbes ranked Gothenburg as the 12th most inventive city in the world September 2013.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2013/07/09/worlds-15-most-inventive-cities/

In 2008 Sofie Sandell was President of JCI London and grew the chamber from 30 to 75 members that year. Ever since then the London chamber has had a membership of over 100 people. Other JCI roles which Sofie has undertaken are JCI UK Marketing Director 2009-2010, JCI UK Website Manager 2011 and JCI London TOYP project manager 2012.

Sofie’s mission for 2013 is to train at least 1,000 people in Digital Leadership and she has reached her target for this year. She has been exploring why and what it is that makes a business survive and thrive for over 15 years.

Sofie Sandell is based in London – she is a speaker, trainer and author. Her book ‘Digital Leadership: How Creativity in Business Can Propel Your Brand and Boost Your Results’ was published in September 2013.

Read more about Sofie Sandell and watch some of her speeches including TEDxUCL speech:
http://www.sofiesandell.com/about

http://www.linkedin.com/in/sofiesandell

About Gothenburg:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothenburg#Economy

Contact Sofie Sandell at sofie@sofiesandell.com

Gothenburg in Swedish is Göteborg.

14th November I was part of the panel in Business Initiative for Schools in North London. It was an amazing day and we listened to about eight business ideas that the students presented.

They had ideas about how to organise your life better, a waterproof MP3 player, a new relaxation pillow and the new Butterstick. For sure they were creative and we left totally inspired.

In the videos below you see Annik Rau, Lee Porter and me saying hello, all streamed online just after the event.

If you would like to organise a ‘Business Initiative for Schools’ event at your school please contact Lee Porter at:  lee.porter@bizforschools.biz

Sofie says: People are questioning why they do what in their lives often – maybe even every day? This is why your brand message must be true, honest and trustworthy.

We live in a ‘why do we exist bubble’ and many people are feeling lost. Your message about what you do to help people must to fit into people’s life on all levels – physically, mentally, and spiritually. And your message also has to be practical and easy to understand.

Brands often find that they have a ‘connection problem’ and that it’s hard to convince their customers that they should buy anything from them and hang out with them.

To stand out I think you must create an emotional connection with your customers that goes into their minds and spirits, and it must feel as a practical solutions as well.

Got it? Right, show the world that you are creative and digital leader.

‘We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.’ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (a French philosopher and Jesuit priest)

He also said ‘The world is round so that friendship may encircle it.’ Love his quotes 

This is a blog post that James Dunford Wood wrote after he attended my session about ‘Creativity in the Digital World’ at the EcommerceExpo in London 3rd October. You can follow James on Twitter as well.

My aim with this keynote and workshop was to make the audience think about what they do and don’t do to nurture creativity and new ideas in their organisation. I wanted them to interact with people they’ve never met before and I also did a improvisation games to make them see how change may feel for the people who are against change. I believe that we have to understand more about the brain and how we are creating thinking patterns to understand how we can get out of them.

“Change is not easy. If anyone says that change is easy,
please don’t trust them.” 

In the audience you had ecommerce managers, managing directors and people working with digital development from major brands. They don’t have an easy job, to create great solutions for the future and I hope that they got more aware about what they do and what they can improve in their organisations after my session.

Thank you UBM and EcommerceExpo for the opportunity.

James Dunford Wood’s blog post

At the recent Ecommerce Expo at London, there was an interesting Director’s Club session on creativity in business, led by digital leadership guru Sofie Sandell – and while the exercises we were invited to do were, well, let’s say unusual (at 10am in the morning – it’s amazing what you’ll do for a free breakfast), the tenor of the talk was inspiring. How, exactly, should businesses approach the issues of creativity and ideas generation, considering that in the fast moving digital world, innovation is the lifeblood of growth?

An example Sofie gave was HMV – in the years prior to its fall, she invited us to imagine how many thousands of hours of meetings were held, presentations researched and written, spreadsheets reworked, in an attempt to make a decision on how to restructure the traditional music selling business in the face of the digital onslaught. And yet nothing happened – they still went down. It’s almost as if management were paralysed to act. Whether this was down to a lack of new ideas, we can only speculate, but even if all the right ideas were on the table, a large and traditional organisation like HMV will inevitably find it hard to change – or pivot in the lingo of Shoreditch and Silicon Valley – quite simply because the stakes are enormous and the consequences of failure so much larger. As one speaker at the recent Internet Retailing conference in London put it – you can only effect change in those circumstances by changing the people.

But however large or small your business, the importance if generating ideas cannot be underestimated, especially in today’s digital economy, where if you don’t keep up you fall away. There are three steps you need to consider.

Step 1 – Create an Ideas Factory

First, new ideas need encouraging and surfacing, not just at board level, but across all the staff. This is not just good for business, it’s also basic management common sense – you need to make people feel valued, and that they have a say in the success of the company. However, how you do it is important, as so often it’s managed in a way that is purely window dressing. This, in a way, is the most important step of all, and the one that is commonly done badly. After all, a business’s most valuable asset is its staff, and if you are not utilising the people who work in your business for ideas on how to do things better, you are wasting a huge resource and opportunity. At the end of this post I will suggest an idea of how to structure this.

Step 2 – Validation

Second, you need a mechanism for sorting and validating ideas. The flip side of ideas generation is that the more you generate, the more you generate!

A few years ago I took time out to write a novel – where I discovered the writer’s secret, which is that as you start to write, and concentrate on it over long periods, your mind becomes increasingly fertile with ideas. It’s as if you are watering a garden, and it’s true that many novels write themselves. However, when you stop, or you focus goes elsewhere, the creativity dries up, even if you preserve an hour or so every day to carry on writing. So as a business, if you are going to ‘open the floodgates’ to new ideas, you need a way to rigourously channel them, because once you ask (provided you do it in the right way), you’ll get a flood of them. This step is the simplest to manage, but it does need a process, and it’s not thought about properly, it can destroy your business. Ideas are dangerous things. Like unexploded bombs, they need handling with extreme care.

For example you need to be ruthless about spending time on only those ideas that further the main goal of your business. Ideas are cheap, it’s the execution that matters, and it’s the execution that takes massive resource and focus. So if the idea does not directly reinforce the direction of the business, then it should be discarded, however good an idea it is. This is a danger especially relevant to smaller, start-up businesses – businesses that may not have finally settled on a direction, in a world where pivoting is a pretty easy option when the ship you have to pivot is a small one. It’s tempting to panic at the first sign of difficulty and change direction, or follow the money, not realising that the money may be temporary. The very nature of start-ups is that there will be a ferment of ideas swilling around, and masses of excitement about creating new things.

The danger of undisciplined chasing of new ideas and avenues is magnified when it gets to tech development. For example you may have a new client, and they tell you they’d like this ‘cool new feature’ that would make their life easier. That’s a good idea, you think, and it looks even better coming from your client, who you want to please, right?  So, do you build it or not? Will any of your other clients (clients you may not yet have) want this ‘cool new feature’? Above all – and this is the key question – is it going to improve your chance of future sales? This is where iron discipline needs to come in, at the risk of disappointing your client (and your developers/designers!). If it’s an edge use case that’s ‘nice to have’, it’s not worth devoting resource to.

Step 3 – Matxh to Resource

Which brings me to the third step: you should only consider ideas that you can actually execute. This may sound a no-brainer, but resource is something of an elastic concept, and it can be allocated in many directions, and you have to look far enough into the future to assess whether you have the resources and skills to bring it to market. Build is the easy bit. Start-ups are littered with cool stuff that went nowhere – not only those that were ‘nice to haves’ that not more than a handful wanted, but also those that really would add value if only they had been marketed properly.

The Importance of Sticking Your Neck Out

So ideas generation is a three step process – generation, validation, and then match-to-resource. But like a funnel, what you get out of the bottom of it depends in large part on what goes in at the top, so setting up a process for generating them a key first step. For larger organisations, it’s more of a challenge, as there are so many layers of management and stakeholders that need to have a voice in the process – and I can imagine the challenge at HMV. Moreover it can be daunting for a junior member of staff to stick her head over the parapet and risk rejection – which in a larger organisation may be as much about the politics as anything else. This is key when it comes to inviting ideas – you must create an atmosphere where people can be encouraged to take risks and not worry about looking stupid. Nowhere is failure more important that in ideas generation, because, as any writer will tell you, you need ten unworkable plot endings for every one that works.

Read the rest of the blog post here

I published my first blog post at the site lifehack.org last week and I would really appreciate if you can share the blog post with your social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

The language and words you use are powerful, and they help you set directions and goals for both yourself and the people around you. I would like to share some of my thoughts about how to foster creativity in your team and organisation. Today, all organisations need to be innovative, and creativity is relatively cheap to invest in compared with recruiting new staff, IT, buildings and other assets.

When working, I’ve observed that many teams are stuck in unproductive patterns, which results in objectives not being met due to poor communication and lack of knowledge about sharing and supporting new ideas. Staff members are hesitant to be creative and it is not the individual’s fault; it is a flaw in the culture and a lack of awareness of how creativity, ideas and innovation work.

Read the full post here 

Creativity and the ability to handle ideas well matters in business and will continue to differentiate the successful businesses from those that are left behind. Aren’t organisations around the world creative? Yes, some organisations are, but when an organisation stops being creative they are risking being a stuffy place where getting things done takes forever. 

Organisations that are left behind have a mind-set of “Yes, but…” and are not willing to learn anything new. New and fresh ideas are not seen as valuable assets and the organisation does not listen to their employees or to their customers. They have become what I call ‘institutionalised’ .

The environment and culture you create for you and your team to work in will matter. One key part of this environment is how you’re handling new ideas, and how you and your team and the whole ecosystem of your organisation are working together. The power of saying “Yes, and…” to new ideas are enormous, it makes people engaged.

I’ve heard comments such as: “We have tried that before and it didn’t work” many times. What this really means is that the people who tried previously could not make it work. It has nothing to do with you and your abilities. If anyone is negative about your idea or suggestion, it means that they, at that moment, cannot see how it will work. What they say is not the whole truth.

A former colleague stopped developing a new marketing campaign simply because his boss made a funny face when he presented it to him. Could he be sure that his boss’ face really meant that it was a bad idea? Or could his boss just have had something else on his mind? I suggested that he should ignore the funny face and continue developing the idea, and he did. After a few weeks in the incubator he launched his marketing campaign and everybody he needed help from bought into the concept and his boss loved it.

Do you think in the same way as the person in the example above? Do you dare to change your own thinking pattern? Are you just slightly improving on what you have? To be truly great and stick out these days, you need to do things differently. Doing things differently means that you have to open up the creative resources you have both within you and within your organisation.

You’re responsible for your own creativity 

You have your personal creativity, your team’s creativity, organisational creativity and the creativity of the ecosystem you belong to. Creativity takes many shapes and forms and is present at all stages of your life.

You’re personally responsible for feeding your creativity, and it’s wise to review what helps you to get into a better flow. We are all different and there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

Team creativity can be tricky. This is the type of creativity that you and your team are most likely to work with. Most of us are not artists and writers working independently. We are part of a bigger system and we should learn how it’s working and how we can improve on it.

Ask yourself:

• How are you handling new ideas in your team? Are you responding in a positive way or are you killing many new ideas in their early stages?

• Can your organisation welcome creative thinking in a better way? Or, are you stuck in old patterns?

• Is the ecosystem you’re working in holding you back and do you feel that it’s impossible to innovate and bring new creative solutions to the table?

How to handle ideas well 

When you dare to say yes to new ideas and you start to use creativity principles, you will unleash an enormous amount of power. Dare to improvise with what’s on offer. How can you make the most of the opportunities you have around you?

There are several good behaviours that you can adopt to get the flow working better. Here are some examples:

• Treat all ideas with respect from the start: like the ugly duckling they might just transform into the most beautiful creature you can imagine.

• Give your colleagues/partners positive feedback every day.

• Have regular team meetings so that people learn to share what they are doing and update each other on projects.

• Stay in a conscious state of mind as often as you can.

How are you and your team working together? Can you be nicer about the ideas you are producing?

This article was first published at the Training Journal as a feature.

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Sofie Sandell is the author of the book ‘Digital Leadership – Dare to be creative, it’s easier than you think’, to be published soon. 

You can download Sofie Sandell’s tips on how to become a leader online and we will let you know when the book is out. Just sign up to Sofie’s newsletter here:http://eepurl.com/oSjz1