How can you use "Lightning Decision Jam" for creative ideas? with Haylee McDonald

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Today it's feeling a bit damp and wet here in the UK, but luckily we're going to Florida, just outside Tampa Bay. We're going to St. Petersburg to meet Hayley Kalani McDonald. Hayley, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.

Well, I'm excited to hear from you because you're going to help us to understand how we can unlock creativity. Now, that's not something that entrepreneurs often really think about being creative beyond maybe the product or the service they develop. So you can help us to understand how we can unlock our creativity, but also how we can create processes around creativity, if I understand you rightly. And that's going to really help us to unlock some of the value. We're also going to talk about things that don't work because you're a communications consultant over there in Florida. So Haley, tell us a little bit about yourself and then tell us what is creativity and why does it matter to the unnoticed entrepreneur?

Yes, I have always been I've been very creative ever since I was a kid, and I'm a big believer that everybody is creative inherently. And if you look back at your childhood, you'll remember just how creative you were. But I was the kid that would come up with magic tricks. They weren't very good, but I had fun and loved arts and crafts. And as I was getting older, the friends that I did have would come to me and I was the go-to person for problems, basically. Can you help me with this? What do I do here? I'm going through XYZ and I'm stressed out. Be that support system for me. And I had always been interested in helping people in some way, shape, or form through creativity. And what that looked like for me at the time when I was younger was music. And I knew that music was a great avenue for emotional outlet or creativity and just getting a lot of what was in our head out to other people. And through that process, you know, it really brings people together. And so I had actually worked in a recording studio in Seattle, Washington, and I was doing audio engineering and music production. As an internship, and I was learning all about these studio tools and music and how to piece pieces of music together. And there were so many talented people that I was surrounded by, and almost every single one of them really struggled to make any sort of money off of the thing they were most passionate about and the most talented about or in. And that led me on the journey of figuring out, well, how can I bring attention to this talent? And that snowballed into the world of marketing. You know, how do we grab attention? How do we write things that are compelling? How do we build a loyal fan base? You know, the psychology behind all of it. And that eventually snowballed into me testing it out with the artists and musicians that were with me or in my circle, so to speak. And helping them with some social media campaigns, their videos, different ideas they could put on there. And the rest is really history after that. Eventually I was like, oh my gosh, I think I can start a business at this point. I've got enough experience doing that. And now I'm more on the consulting side.

So I love the story. And I had a job first of all, working actually in putting equipment into music studios. So I spent a lot of time in big places with beautiful equipment, but also very talented people, as you say, that weren't getting their full rewards. Now, Hayley, though, tell us about creativity. How can an entrepreneur who's pretty stressed with all the other dimensions of running a business inject creativity into their marketing? How can they get headspace for that without just subcontracting it or being kind of tactical?

Yeah, I'm a big believer that innovation and creativity are really what drive a business forward and make it truly successful. And for any entrepreneur, even the act of wanting to be an entrepreneur, there's a sense of creative drive in that because you have to solve problems for people. And I believe that really the only way to solve problems is to think creatively. So, my definition of creativity is to think differently, to see things from other perspectives that you may not have otherwise seen, to stay curious and to stay open to every possibility, regardless of whether you're going to actually take that idea and run with it or not. And it's really the collaboration process between this divergent thinking on one side, where we're opening ourselves up to all those possibilities, things that we're trying to connect the dots with the certain problems we're solving, and then mixing that divergent thinking with the convergent thinking process, where we now have to pare down what we think may actually be useful to the problem we're solving and start to assign tasks or action plans to those things.

Hayley, I love that very articulate description there of creativity, thinking differently, but you've talked about creating this, if you like, List of ideas and then making them into tasks. How do you decide which of those ideas are going to work or are going to be in alignment with the company's vision and which one to walk away from? How do you help your clients do that?

Yeah, before I get into the actual mechanism or system that I use, I think it's important to understand that when we are leveraging creativity, because it's so expansive, We have to have something that actually constrains us. And I think that when we have some constraints, our creativity can be enhanced. So, what I do to take teams or people through that process of dwindling down the best ideas and assigning them, you know, to people, to a team, to a project, is we start with all of the ideation process, right? And there's many ways to do this. You could do a mind map, you could do brainstorming. There's thing called a Lightning Decision Jam. And then what we do is we really prioritize the best ideas. And the way that we prioritize the best ideas is my favorite way, which is basically an impact versus effort scale. So, if you think of a graph where we've got impact on one axis and effort on the other, And if you draw a line down the middle and a line horizontally in the middle, you've got these 4 quadrants. And we want to think of, out of all the ideas we came up with, which one is going to have the highest impact and the lowest effort. And we start one by one with every single idea, putting it on this graph and saying, where would this fit on the impact versus effort? And then we stick it down. So let's say we've got 5 ideas, we put them all in there, and then the ones that have the highest impact, lowest effort, we do first. We assign first. Anything that is high impact and high effort, that's something that's going to take a bit more time to put into. So that's going to be more of a project, which can be broken down even further into steps on how to go about finishing that project. Anything else, right? Let's say it's low impact but low effort. That's more of a task, something that we can just do maybe 2 minutes or less, 5 minutes or less, and it just gets done. It's part of our daily actions. And then anything else that's low impact and high effort, we just forget about it. Put a pin in it for now. It's clearly not that important. So that's the process that I go through with myself and with teams to really figure out, out of all these ideas that we have, which ones are going to be the most beneficial and how to actually figure out which ones to focus on first.

Holy Kalani McDonald, that's fantastic. And so you've got a really interesting combination of the creative and the logical working there with you and your clients. You mentioned a lightning jam, I think it was called. I've never heard of that before. I've heard of things like the De Bono 6 Hats. What is the lightning jam?

Yeah. So the LDJ, or a Lightning Decision Jam, it's something you can Google. So I definitely encourage anybody who's interested to check it out more in depth. It's not something I came up with. I believe the person who came up with it, or the company, was AJ&Smart. And it's really a design thinking process. So a perfect example of merging creativity in with the logical process. What it is, it can be anywhere from 15 minutes to 90 minutes. So, it's something that we're compressing what would probably be a meeting or a brainstorm into something that's very short and efficient. And the process starts by ideating a mass of essentially problems, right? Usually, we start with something positive, like what's going well with our project. And for example, let's say it's an advertising campaign. And the advertising campaign is for protein bars. And we're like, okay, you know, they taste good, people are enjoying them, you know, the people are popping off of the shelves because the packaging is great. And then we focus on the challenges or problems, things that are either stressing us out, things that are slowing us down, things that we are unclear about. Or anything else that's basically a hurdle that we're trying to push through, and then we take all of those problems and we start to break down or really turn them into I should say how might we questions. So if the challenges are social media advertising, we're not getting very much engagement on the protein bar company page. So how might we increase our engagement on Our company, Instagram. That was an example of how we can turn one of the problems into a how might we statement. And then based off of those, we start to vote so that whoever's on the team actually starts to vote on the statements or the problems that are most prevalent to the team, meaning what is going to be the most important or impactful when we solve it. And after they vote and we've turned them into those how might we statements, we start coming up with solutions. That's again turning it back into that big ideation process, and we start the process all over again. So now that we have a bunch of ideas for the solutions, we vote on the best solutions, and then we shift them into that impact versus effort scale, and we take each of the solutions and put them in there. So That is what the Lightning Decision Jam structure is. And it's really great for, honestly, replacing team meetings, weekly team meetings. You could turn them into 15-minute LDJs and say, what went really well last week? What do we need to work on this week? How are we going to do that? And then picking the solutions that are best to do that moving forward.

Hayley, you've mentioned here, you know, a lot of teamwork. Is your position that people can be creative only in a team or on their own? What's your view on that?

I love that you asked that question. I don't know if I've ever been asked that before, but I believe that creativity is enhanced by working with other people. I think that there is, you know, a collective intelligence that we really tap into by working with other people on projects. And if I can come up with 10 ideas, 2 people can come up with 1,000 ideas because we're bouncing things off of each other and that sparks a domino effect or a ripple effect of new possibilities. So, I think that absolutely we can be creative as individuals, But if you're looking to go really far, it's just like that famous quote, go together. You can do it alone, but it's going to be more enjoyable. You're going to be more successful doing it with other people.

Okay. Yeah, I think that's absolutely great. And being present with people as opposed to just Zoom, I think as well is helping people to get energy from each other as well, isn't it? Hayley, what examples do you have of Creativity not working? Because, you know, as a consultant in the creative industries, people would say, well, of course, Hayley would say you need to be creative, but there must be some examples of when creativity doesn't work because creativity isn't the end in itself, is it? It's supposed to be helping the business. So can you give us one or two examples of how creativity cannot serve a business?

Sure. One of the One of the examples that comes to mind is when I was working with this band in Seattle and the band was super creative. I mean, they played music, right? So, they've got a lot of creative energy flowing. And because of that, they had so many ideas. And through their social media, that's what we were working on specifically, was boosting their social media presence and building more engagement and a loyal fan base so people will come to their shows. But they had so many ideas and wanted to implement every single one of them that it actually slowed down the progress and the growth altogether. Because I think the beauty of creativity is that it's so expansive and it leads to so many possibilities. But the downfall of creativity is that if you're not just focusing on one, that all of the other stuff is really just going to fall apart. And if you're trying to segment your social media ideas or your content ideas into hundreds of little things, then all of it kind of gets muddled. There's no one thing that's doing really well. So when creativity doesn't work is when it's not pared down. by constraints, by saying, okay, this is the one thing out of the ideas that we had that we're focusing on. I think that if there's too much creativity in it, then the balance is off.

Right. That's fantastic. And what about when people are doing things that are sort of creative, but maybe seem a bit kind of at odds with their brand? I mean, every now and again, we see sort of a lawyer on TikTok, for example, dancing and people People are commenting on it because it seems kind of at odds with the perception. What's your view of alignment and creativity?

I think that it really has to feel like it makes sense to you, especially if you are a solopreneur or the face of a brand, then people are going to get to know your personality. And where it gets tricky is when you're looking into marketing or you have a team and they're very focused on tactics and strategies. For example, that TikTok lawyer is a great example. You know, their social media team was probably like, get on TikTok, do some cool trending dances and sounds, and that will help boost your reach. But if that doesn't feel authentic, or if anybody who really knows that person or even doesn't know that person, you can just tell that when they're doing those dances or when they're doing those trending sounds, that there's not enough of an authentic energy there. It feels off because it is off. It's not something that person would normally do. But that doesn't mean that you can't follow tactics and strategies that are in alignment with who you are, right? So instead of trending dances and sounds, moving into more of an overarching trend of like asking people questions on the street. Right. So that's an example that made me feel more authentic to that lawyer on TikTok rather than doing some dances.

Very nice. So being in alignment and being authentic. Haley, you've moved to St. Petersburg from Seattle as an entrepreneur. How have you been getting yourself noticed?

There's been a few ways. The main way is getting integrated with my community in person. There's a lot of events going on here. It seems like there's an event every single day. And so Getting out into the community and meeting people and understanding what they do for work and what their dreams are has been a large proponent of that. And I would say podcasts is actually another one. I just found out about a local podcast, and I think that they're up and coming now where it's just a podcast that is specifically about St. Petersburg, Florida. And they talk to business owners here. They talk about events going on here, all of the cool, fun things about St. Pete. And so I think that's been a really interesting way that, you know, you can amplify your own community. And then for me, being on podcasts in general is reaching out, reaching audiences that I may not have ever reached before.

Yeah. And how are you finding out about those podcasts, Hayley? What tools are you using?

Yeah, I use Matchmaker FM. That's been my favorite tool. It's super friendly and easy to use, and the searching makes It very simple to find the specific topics that resonate with me and what I do for work. And I'll reach out to them on a message. They make the DMing super easy. And I'll first listen to the podcast, you know, make sure it's a good fit. And then I'll tell them all the things about that I love about it. And I'll give them more information on me and really, you know, cross my fingers, so to speak, that authenticity came through and they're excited to have me on the show.

Well, your authenticity came through on the pitch to me, so I appreciated that all the way. Well, the warmth of Florida came through on the email, Haley. If people want to find out more about you, Haley Kalani McDonough, where can they do that?

Yes, the best place to connect with me is most likely LinkedIn. You can find me under Haley Kalani MCD, and I post tips, advice, resources, content on there, and you can also DM me. My website's linked on my LinkedIn, so all that good stuff.

Haley, thank you so much for joining me and talking about creativity, which is something we've really not talked much about on The Unnoticed Entrepreneur before. So thank you for reaching out and sharing that today.

Thank you, it was a pleasure. I had a lot of fun.

Good. Yeah, me too. So thank you. Hopefully you listening wherever you are today to the show have also had fun and found it interesting. And Haley and I were talking about creativity there And she was talking before about finding creativity when you're working with others. So don't let yourself get locked away in the office trying to think about creativity. Find other people, take some exercise, take some social time to be creative. That's when the best ideas happen. So I hope you've enjoyed this podcast with me, Jim James, here in the UK, and today, Hayley in Florida. Wherever you are, please do share this show with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur. And if you've enjoyed it, please do review the show on your player because it really Really helps, lets me know as well what you think about the show. And until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating. Thanks for listening.