Changing Perspectives... on Culture

As someone who has lived in Germany, grown up in Italy, and now works as a strategist in Melbourne, Australia, I’ve seen firsthand how diverse backgrounds enhance brainstorming.

There is a beautiful metaphor to illustrate my point: “When you’re a hammer, everything is a nail.”

If the team has a similar cultural and professional background, they are likely to find the same solution, independent of the nuances of the problem, because that’s what they are used to doing.

But when you increase the diversity in your room – differences in age, gender, ethnicity, culture, language, education, socioeconomic status, personality, or skills – you have a Swiss-army knife capable of taking on any challenge with surgical precision, finding bespoke solutions.

Out of that diversity checklist, two of them are close to my personal experience and journey: culture and skills.

I speak three languages and learned early on that each one brings with it a new way of looking at the world. For example, the Germans have a word, ‘Fernweh,’ which has no perfect correspondent in English or Italian. It means longing for faraway places, underscoring a need for travel and discovery common to many cultures, but that only the Germans named so singularly.

There are many more examples of unique words, rituals, and worldviews specific to each culture. Access to those enables us to look at things from different angles, which is central to the brainstorming process.

The second one is skill sets and professional background. Before being a strategist, I was a performance marketer. I learned how to be very analytical, data-driven, and outcome-focused.

Those are valuable skills for any strategist, but they need to be integrated with a deep understanding of the challenges the business faces, breaking apart the market and its competitors to identify strategic opportunities.

Effectively, I speak the language of two disciplines, which helps me to translate and increase cross collaboration between departments and also increases my flexibility in finding the most appropriate tool depending on the issue at hand.

Ultimately, I have seen firsthand how both these types of diversity foster better ideas. There is a degree of novelty that needs to be unlocked for great insights and solutions. At Atomic 212, we have started to open brainstorms to the whole agency, and the best have included a wide mix of people.

Different backgrounds, ages, seniority levels, and specialties all work collaboratively and bring fresh ideas to the table.

In our industry, we often silo between client and non-client teams, departments, and seniority levels, stifling novelty and favouring process security.

However, that often isn’t the best approach when it comes to brainstorming. My feeling is that we will be required to think more and more to differentiate ourselves from AI, which is going to absorb many of the more mundane media buying processes.

So, how are you thinking about increasing diversity in your brainstorms? Are you leveraging the full spectrum of skills and perspectives available in your organisation?

By actively incorporating diverse backgrounds into your ideation process, you can enhance the quality and innovation of your brainstorms.