Your Conference Room is Killing Your Creativity. Here's What You Can Do About It.

It’s inconvenient but true: the answers to your biggest business challenges can’t be found in a conference room. Routine is the enemy of creativity – and you can’t achieve innovative solutions without thinking creatively. In order to truly think outside the box, it’s vital to step out beyond the glass confines of your conference room and immerse yourself in the people behind the numbers. In the following paragraphs, we’ll explore how your team can effectively escape the monotony in favor of better, more customer-centric ideas.

Three reasons why you should solve your business problems in the real world:

1. Empathy is built in the field.

Clients across categories have told us that their teams are drowning in data but starved for insight. Numbers can only ever tell part of a story, and it’s easy to forget that the charts within those PowerPoint decks represent living, breathing human beings with values, challenges, expectations, and outside motivations.

2. Fresh ideas come from new perspectives.

Meeting the same colleagues in the bright glare of an office with the same donuts and coffee week after week is likely to inspire the same ideas and same marketing jargon. But hearing, seeing and interacting with the customers who know your brand best will fill your head with new opinions and untapped insights that lead to fresh thinking.

3. Breakthroughs happen via real-time, rapid fire ideation.

Teams thrive in new, high energy environments. Rapid-fire ideation is the best way to solve problems and identify opportunities, which in turn creates strategic momentum. Transplanting your team into another dimension will get the idea juices flowing and spark innovative approaches.  

“Epiphanies rarely occur in familiar surroundings. In order to do something different, you have to see things differently at very much a literal level.”

– Gregory Berns, author of Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently

How to Get Out There

This sounds easy, right? Schedule a team outing to explore Little Tokyo and BOOM – new ideas for days. Offsites might be great for morale, but true customer immersion requires an insights-backed approach if your goal is real results. And when I say “insights-backed,” I’m not talking about the back room of a focus group in Cincinnati. At Kelton, we believe true customer immersion is achieved through innovative, fresh and modern methodologies that break boundaries while resting upon core research principles. To properly plan your escape from conference room monotony, you’ll need help. That’s why we created Insights Bootcamp – a 31 day plan to get your team out of the office, inspire real-world ideas, and prompt forward momentum. The process helps your team capture and iterate on ideas in real-time so that they are primed for implementation.

Inside Insights Bootcamp

We begin by working with your team to define desired outcomes, establish hypotheses, and outline key challenges you’re experiencing. Then, we create experiences that foster expansive thinking and innovative ideas. Our approach to designing immersive experiences is completely custom – everything from Cultural Insights, to online anthropology, to eat-alongs and consumer speed dating is fair game so long as it wakes your team up and inspires fresh thinking. We also layer on digital insights from our partners at LRWMotiveQuest, examining organic conversations in your category to find fresh, inspired opportunities. Lastly, we guide your team through a high energy workshop designed to get the best ideas and solutions on the table and then put them into action. Our exercises prioritize rapid ideation, so your team can agree on a plan for implementation in record time.  

The innovative ideas and answers are out there. Insights Bootcamp can help your team find them.

Learn more about how we can help you design a custom Insights Bootcamp for your team – Talk to Nicole or

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