We all know that meetings can be tedious, tiring, and ineffective at resolving the problems our businesses are facing. We need creativity and openness, and what we get instead is disinterested yawning and unhelpful criticism. In many cases, however, this unfortunate situation can be improved with some strategic adjustments to our usual meeting routines.
Encouraging Participation
First and foremost, allow people to share ideas without fear of criticism or interruption. Managers or other employees who respond negatively to “bad” ideas discourage people from sharing their ideas at all. Many people are already hesitant to speak up in groups or take the social risk of sharing their ideas. Harsh or critical responses all but guarantee decreased participation. Keep brainstorming sessions free of judgement about the value of individual ideas in order to foster openness.
It can also help to make it clear from the outset that there’s nothing wrong with sharing ideas that don’t work or won’t ever get used. We all have lots of ideas and not all of them are equally viable or valuable, but sharing them gets everyone thinking. One person’s off-the-wall concept might lead to another person’s a-ha moment.
It’s common for most groups to have a few people who speak more than others and maybe a few folks who hesitate to speak at all. A simple way to address this is to go around the room and ask each person to contribute an idea or share their opinion. You can do this during a meeting if you need to bring back some balance to the conversation, or you can do it in advance by letting each participant know that they should be prepared to share at least one idea.
Depending on the size and structure of your team, you may want to consider stepping things up a notch and breaking people up with a 3 meeting combo. It works like this:
Hold a short initial meeting with all the relevant players. This meeting is simply to lay out the problem that you are working on, not to solicit suggestions or ideas for solutions. Ask everyone to go back and consider the problem for a day or so.
Schedule the next meeting with the creative thinkers on your team. The purpose of this meeting is to generate lots of ideas for potential solutions or courses of action. Let them know that you won’t be settling on anything during this meeting. Just gathering ideas.
Finally, hold a meeting with the more analytical members of the team. The people who might have spent their time poking holes in people’s ideas during the creative meeting are ideal here. Review the ideas presented in the creative meeting and let this team voice their objections.
The outcome of this process should be a good set of thoroughly vetted ideas. You may want to continue this process, sending anonymized feedback to the creative group and soliciting more ideas for further analysis, until a solution becomes clear.
Encouraging Creativity
Sometimes simply creating a healthy environment and encouraging participation isn’t enough. You need something to light that creative fire.
It may sound counter-intuitive, but a good way to approach this is to ask for everyone in the meeting to share the worst idea they can think of. This can be especially effective when creativity has stalled or a problem is particularly difficult. Thinking of terrible ideas takes the pressure off and brings some humor into the room, two important factors that contribute to creative thinking. It’s surprising how often breakthrough ideas can come out sessions like this. It seems that when we are presented with clearly bad ideas our minds automatically start thinking of better alternatives.
Another way to get the ideas flowing is to play the “Yes and…” game. This is an improv game, and it works like this: One person starts off with a basic idea or concept and, no matter what it is, instead of negating it, belittling it, or disagreeing with it, the next person has to say, “Yes, and…” They must accept the scenario as it’s presented and then to add to it. Each person should try to add something that the next person will also be able to build from.
“We could all wear tuxedos to the trade show this year.”
“Yes, and we could host a black tie party on the last day of the show.”
“Yes, and we could lend people clothes for the party in exchange for a meeting with us during the show.”
“Yes and…”
You get the idea. Running through this exercise a few times can usually generate a lot of very creative ideas. Not all of them will actually work, but that’s ok. Those ideas led to the ones that do work. However, if you still aren’t getting the ideas you’re looking for, here’s one last tactic:
Take a walk.
There’s nothing like fresh air to bring out fresh ideas. This works best when done one-on-one or in very small groups, so everyone can easily participate in the conversation. At first, just talk about life or whatever else is on your mind. You’ll find that the conversation will probably come back around to work fairly quickly, and then you can get into the problem at hand.
So there you have it. We hope at least one of these techniques helps improve the quality of your meetings and leads to some breakthrough ideas.
