Drinking our own Growth culture Kool-Aid - See how neutral outcome conventions shaped a strategy discussion to yield a new set of experiment ideas we would have otherwise missed. It all started with a basic tool that we use to grease the wheels of Growth. It was a culture achievement built around neutrality.
Make your marketing work by focusing on growth mindset.
Your Growth Culture Strategy Matters: Supporting Neutral Conversations
We built a methodology to make marketing tools work better, so that we can serve our clients better, and help businesses grow - and a big part of this methodology focuses on building a healthy growth culture. In a recent planning session for our own marketing strategy, I experienced how applying neutrality to our conversations about ideas, a cornerstone concept of Growth Culture, can drive a conversation and make the outcome much more efficient and effective - and enjoyable!
(Growth) Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast — And Washes it Down With Kool-Aid
Our methodology helps build a framework and uses your marketing tools to fuel growth. The best way to grow your business is to be efficient while also generating revenue. You’ll need tools and processes for that, and we have created a system that works. Recently I got to experience the system in practice and witnessed how the neutral outcome conventions changed the course of a discussion. Here’s how it went down…
We were brainstorming ideas to generate revenue, with the intention of weighing the ideas and prioritizing them, so we know where to focus to get to revenue the fastest and most efficient way. The discussion started to focus on two big ideas that could potentially result in new leads and deals. It was interesting to notice how my initial instinct was to be competitive. I wanted one idea to win in a competition. I said “these are two great ideas. We can test them to see which one works best.”
This is a natural human thought process - survival of the fittest. It’s a thing. As I started to see the cascade of negativity and challenges that could come from this mindset, I stepped back and applied our methodology, and I recalled the Growth Culture strategy mindset.
One of the key tools for creating a healthy and productive culture within your business is the neutral outcome conventions. Words are powerful, and can either fuel or snuff out a fire. The neutral outcome convention reminds us to choose our words carefully. For example, in experimentation there are never “losers” because knowledge can always be gained. And knowledge is always a win.
Reframing opens the conversation for more possibilities. So, I shifted my perspective and rephrased my comment so that it was simply curious and neutral. What if there wasn’t a winner and a loser? What if I stopped planning to find an outcome so that I can kill an idea, and simply stay open to new ideas? Instead of “let’s see which idea wins” the question was “let’s see what works and explore what we learn from these two experiments." And then the ideas started to flow with ways we can integrate the two ideas together and make the results even more powerful and significant. Mmmm — that Kool-Aid is delicious.
At OP, we make marketing tools work. There’s no shortage of tools out there that will help your business grow, but the key to success is HOW you use the tools. We built an entire process around how to use marketing tools to grow your business, because we wanted to do better for our clients. What resulted is a whole online course that will help ANY marketer build a more effective marketing plan that gets results.
So, while our initial intention was to help improve our own client relationships, we realized that this methodology can work for anyone, whether you work with OP or not. And it’s just too good not to share. After all, isn’t the world a better place when we all win?
Click HERE to get access to our lesson on how to build a Growth Culture for your business:
