Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

6 Techniques I Have Used To Challenge Conventional Thinking

Regis Hadiaris, Dot Connector

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

- Albert Einstein

Throughout his life, my Dad taught me that I truly could be whatever I decided to be. His confidence in me gave me the strength to believe in my ideas, challenge conventional thinking, and take risks.

Below are 6 techniques I’ve used to successfully challenge conventional thinking in my life.

1. Identify and ignore “noise” in your life.
Noise is the unnecessary stuff that distracts your attention and limits your effectiveness: naysayers, gossip, opinions of news media, fear, etc. If you are determined to challenge conventional thinking, you have to train yourself to ignore noise.

I work for Quicken Loans, one of the nation’s largest direct mortgage lenders, in arguably the most challenging time for the financial industry in 20 years. If I listened to all the noise about how bad the mortgage crisis is, I would become paralyzed by negativity and fear. Instead of focusing on the constraints around me, I consciously look for opportunities. Don’t let yourself become a product of your environment; let your environment become a product of you!

2. Don’t recreate the wheel.
I’ve seen companies launch huge new initiatives without ever stopping to ask themselves: “has someone done this already?” Be curious! Instead of blindly jumping into a project, take a step back and think “someone must have run into this situation before, what did they do?”

We recently decided to focus on a particular marketing strategy at Quicken Loans. Instead of starting from scratch, we flew several key people to another, non-competitive company to discuss our plan. Because that company had already executed this strategy really well, the day we spent with them saved us months of trial-and-error.

3. Take a stand.
A couple of years ago, I was leading a project that a senior executive didn’t agree with. He didn’t think the project could make an impact on the business. I believed that it would. We compromised, and he gave me 90 days to prove it. I did, and the executive was proud of the accomplishment.

It can be hard to challenge consensus. But if you truly believe in what you are doing, you can’t be afraid to voice an opinion or do things that others don’t understand. Remember: the thinking that got you where you are will seldom get you where you want to go.

4. Get excited when people tell you “no.”
So many people let others dictate what they can and cannot do. Before they know it, they have lost the ability to be effective. When people tell me “no, we can’t do that,” I immediately think “how can we?”

Every day, I have conversations about ideas that are too hard to do, solutions that are too complicated, and costs that are too expensive. If you attack these situations by creatively brainstorming alternatives, you can inevitably find ways to turn these “no’s” into “yes’s.”

. Keep it simple like Forrest Gump.
“When I got tired, I slept. When I got hungry, I ate. When I had to go… you know… I went.” Forrest kept life simple. Do you?

At Quicken Loans, we have a “no big projects” rule. Why? Big projects usually mean lots of over-complicated ideas that simply aren’t needed to solve the problem at hand. You can have big visions but still execute them in small chunks. Doing this encourages constant improvement, and helps prevent marketing projects that are out of sync with current business needs.

6. Be effective, not busy.
My team completed over 1,100 internet marketing projects last year alone. While that’s an impressive accomplishment, I’m most proud of the impact those projects made. Every single thing we do has a legitimate business reason, or we don’t do it. And every morning we meet to discuss the thing we can do that day to be the most effective.

Every person on my team has (literally) hundreds of things on their to-do list. Our concern is not getting them all done. Instead, we ask ourselves, are we working on the right things, right now? Once we focus on being effective, instead of being busy, we automatically get into a mental mode of challenging conventional wisdom.

Try one of these techniques, and you can take an ordinary day and make it great! Try them all, and you will hone your ability to challenge conventional thinking.

*Regis Hadiaris is an award-winning Internet marketer and experienced leader known for unconventional ideas and impressive results. He is the “Leader of Leaders and Pursuer of WOW!” at Quicken Loans, the nation’s
largest online mortgage lender. His blog, Dot Connector, is a popular destination for personal development and leadership. If you enjoyed this post, you should subscribe to Dot Connector!

Posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Employee Relations, Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.