October 10, 2007
Better Brainstorming
By Tom Ryan
According to CIO Magazine, several studies show that the level of meeting effectiveness is the single most powerful factor in job satisfaction. Unfortunately, studies also found most meetings are ineffective and frustrating exercises.
The magazine cites a 2005 Microsoft survey of 38,000 people worldwide that found the average person spent 5.6 hours each week in meetings, yet 69 percent of them felt that meetings weren’t productive. Likewise, a 2005 study of 908 employees on meetings published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that for driven employees focused on completing tasks and achieving goals, meetings are an annoying time waster. For these employees, job satisfaction actually decreased as the number of meetings increased.
Given the importance of employee ideas in driving innovation, The Wall Street Journal’s Independent Street column last week explored the best way companies can tap employees’ ideas. Among the popular options offered in the column were surveys, typically administered anonymously to find out what employees truly think; as well as family events inviting spouses and kids to offer ideas.
Among the more adventurous ones was PrintingForLess.com creating one central coffee area for the whole building to force marketing people to interact with workers operating the printing presses. Also, Digineer Inc., tech consultants, launched a program, Lunch Around, where once a month, six randomly-selected employees, from all parts of the company, come together to talk.
Meanwhile, on his website, international business consultant Lee Iwan advises companies to provide magazines and books that have nothing to do with their industry to encourage outside-the-box thinking and sharing. Among his even more unorthodox methods, Mr. Iwan encourages companies to move furniture around the office, or bring in toys or puzzles that require manual manipulation.
The CIO Magazine article suggests firms might consider hiring a specialist to educate meeting leaders on techniques to help managers get over meeting fatigue. Among the tips for better meetings was holding only necessary meetings, creating a clear agenda with adequate follow-through, and encouraging participation by creating “an atmosphere of respect” as well as post-meeting feedback.
“The main thing people hate about meetings is that they are poorly run or don’t accomplish anything,” Glen Parker, team building consultant and author of Meeting Excellence: 33 Tools to Lead Meetings that Get Results, told CIO Magazine. All too often, employees walk away from a meeting thinking, “That was not a good use of my time, we just sort of talked a lot, and there was no clear purpose or outcome.”
Discussion Question: What do you think are the best ideas to improve workplace meetings? What do you find are some successful methods to drive innovative thinking? Are their some unorthodox methods you’ve seen that work?
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The firms that have the worst meetings are often the same folks who resist change the most. Perhaps the easiest way to improve meetings is to routinely reserve a few minutes at the end of each meeting to ask everyone, “How could we have made this meeting more productive?” Of course, if the boss is totally self-centered or a bully, it’s unlikely that significant improvements will follow.
Fostering the innovative thinking of employees is a fantastic subject. Unfortunately, it is one most leaders are the worst offenders of all employees.
I say this because of my experiences over the years. One of the first lessons I learned early in my career was that the people who do the work are the people to whom you should look for the innovation. This is especially true of employees who are responsible for repeated processes on a constant basis. For example, if a company wishes to understand a better way to build a product for sale or increase the quality with little cost; ask the people who do the work.
They know the product inside and out. The same is true of white collar jobs as well. If a marketer needs to know how to get items to market, talk to the sales department and clients as to the barriers to entry. If a marketer needs to understand what makes their end users buy and how they buy, then either survey, observe but always test and measure your results.
Unfortunately, most at the top have the attitude of no one knows better than they do what the best course of action is and should be.
The top of the house must foster the cooperation, communication and the creative process before the innovation will ever come forth. Then, never hold anyone’s idea up for ridicule. The fastest way to squelch cooperation is to belittle your employees input.
Instead, reward them! Pay them a percentage of the savings or increase in sales. After all they are the ones who actually do the work. You are the leaders. Lead…preferably by example.
Make sure lots of Mountain Dew is available. It got me through Professor Longhair’s lectures and it got me through some long-winded VP meetings. Finally Doron Levy mentioned something on Power Point. Eliminating ineffectual Power Point presentations is a must. I just hate it when some knucklehead VP has to show off his secretary’s animation skills on Power Point. Finally, don’t have VPs and managers in the meetings that have no relevance. Such as those who have “make-work” jobs as a result of some politically correct initiative. When they are present, everyone has to be on guard with what they say and how they say it. When they are out of the room, we can just say what’s on our minds, swear and curse, get to the point quicker, and the meeting will be over sooner.
My thoughts on the concept and use of “meetings”:
1. The sole appropriate purpose of a meeting is to engage multiple people simultaneously in creative problem solving.
2. The critical component is that the problem or situation requires a solution outside any single individual’s control or area of “known” understanding.
3. Essential meeting practices involve initially clearing away the barriers to creative communication by making public all the things the participants “know” to be true. Often many of these are simply beliefs which no longer have value.
4. A “meeting” is a tool by which a “group” produces a joint solution, action plan and timeline for accomplishment.
5. Presentations are not meetings. In very limited practice there is value to making presentations. More often, given technology, there are far more effective and efficient methods of providing information.
6. Conversations are not meetings. Conversations can occur without purpose, and do not involve a shared sense of ownership to produce a solution and then implement that solution. Good meetings often include interactive conversation as a mechanism to better understand suggestions, ideas or concerns.
7. If the objective of the meeting is NOT to further the purpose of a “group,” don’t have the meeting.
8. If the solution to a challenge or problem is within the “known” universe for one or more potential “owners” of the problem, a meeting will not serve a significant purpose.
Overall, meetings are extraordinarily useful in producing breakthrough results to challenges where the solution lies outside of any one individual’s realm of “known” answers. Otherwise, meetings are completely ineffective ways to do things that other management tools do much better.
A couple of quick comments.
– The survey says the average employee spends 5.6 hours in meeting. I think this is the average management employee, which in the retail industry only makes up about 7% of the workforce. The other 93% of these employees would love to have to go to a meeting where someone would get them involved or let them know what is going on.
– To make meeting more effective a few ideas:
1. Have a room with no chairs and tables and lot of white boards.
2. Every meeting must have a starting time and ending time and an agenda.
3. Make sure that you have someone that make sure the meeting stays on track (as someone else suggested a meeting director.
This a good topic, especially for North American retailers who devote every Monday morning to intensive performance reviews throughout the organizational hierarchy. I’ve often felt that this practice would be unnecessary, or dramatically different, with better reporting.
Consider the effort and the IT muscle needed to process weekend sales, roll weekly totals, develop reporting summaries, and feed the ancillary data marts, data warehouse, spread sheets and access tables. As I write this, I am picturing General Merchandise Managers, their divisionals, buyers, each with three to five inches of print outs.
Have they had a chance to digest these tomes? Of course not, if you spend thirty seconds a page on a 300 page report, you’ve spent 2.5 hours. But the meeting starts early.
What is needed is a consistent approach to find problems and opportunities, followed by a systematic approach to respond to them. Basically, the playbook doesn’t have to be reinvented every week. When sales are strong, you bring merchandise in early and aggressively. When sales are weak, you promote. When assortments are thin with strong selling, you broaden. When they are too broad, you thin. When margins are disappointing, you strengthen the mix or get out.
Problem-remedy. You don’t need to waste hundreds of man hours every week where everyone has information, but no one has time to analyze it. Use the computer to analyze and inform and also to suggest what part of the playbook should be used to respond.
Think of hours that would be saved. Think of the forests.
Structure is probably the biggest double edged sword when it comes to meetings. While structure will keep things organized and flowing, it tends to make meetings boring and dry. I think a healthy combination of structure and interactivity is the key to keep participants awake. Especially when trying to sell them a new idea. I usually try to stay away from the standard Power Point presentation and include some role playing or other interactive component. The best advice is to have someone extroverted run the meeting to keep things fresh and lively!
The most common problem with meetings is the misperception about the purpose. A meeting is a method, not an answer or a solution.
Often, there is the tendency for people to react to problems by setting up a meeting. People attend the meeting with little or no preparation and unclear notions about the purpose. This causes frustration and wasted efforts.
Meetings have their purpose. They are excellent for delivering information, training or education, sharing ideas, and agreeing to steps. However, meetings alone seldom result in solutions.
The best idea is to really focus on making meetings–preferably less of them–forums for a free flow of ideas and information. Too many people still work in silos without contact with people in other parts of the organization. People have a tendency to stay in their comfort zones and not get involved in areas with which they are not familiar. Big mistake. Intermingle people and ideas and you can get a potpourri of innovation–not just the same old thinking that is designed to protect one group’s turf.
On another front, people need to know that their ideas won’t be held against them. Too many people keep their mouths and minds shut because they are afraid to say the wrong thing and derail their careers. People who run meetings must make it clear that there are no wrong answers and you will not be held accountable for thinking out loud.
Here are some of my recommended practices for in-house meetings:
1. The best surprise is NO SURPRISE. Announce meetings in advance giving attendees a reasonable amount of time for preparation. Be specific about starting time, location, and state the objectives, or put out a simple meeting agenda, in advance.
2. Facilitator or Moderator is Essential. Someone needs to lead the discussion and be in charge to make sure objectives are met, no matter how informal the meeting. Attendees respond best to some reasonable order and basic organization. The meeting’s leader needs to keep the topics on time, on target, and be sure that each participant is having his or her chance to participate, ask questions, be heard, and be listened to.
3. Start on Time. It’s critical to show and practice respect for everyone’s own time. Meetings that wait for latecomers, or meetings that stop and start, almost always totally lose meaning and impact. Everyone needs to be present at the start, and on-time. After 5 minutes into the start of the meeting, the doors should be closed, even if only figuratively.
4. Environment is an Influence. The surroundings and atmosphere are as critical to perception as packaging and design are critical to a consumer product! Meeting rooms should be kept clean, relevant, uncluttered, bright, and comfortable. Real people are greatly affected by senses.
5. Cell Phones in the meeting are a turn-off! Almost nothing is more frustrating to meeting attendees, no matter how informal, then if the flow is interrupted by someone answering irrelevant cell phone calls during the discussion.
6. Take Notes! Everyone in the meeting should have a pad of paper or a laptop in front of him or her, but one person should be assigned to taking general notes for the entire meeting. Attendees feel more at ease when they know that notes are being taken and will be distributed after the meeting. Of course, this also helps to keep people in line, in a reasonable way, as well.
7. Objectives need to be clear and obvious! When the meeting starts, re-state the meeting’s purpose and tell attendees what to expect, and what needs to be accomplished right here and now. Use visuals, even if informal, and don’t be afraid to moderate, and make changes on the run, but tell people what you are doing, and why.
Meetings are disliked by many people and indeed do cause stress but what bothers me about this is that it doesn’t have to be that way, and in contrast, meetings could be used in a very productive way, to make everyone in the organization better at what they do.
Gawd, I hate meetings. Toys or puzzles are a crackpot idea, and highly unlikely to produce productive results in the real world. What are some people smoking? Really! Tasers might be a good idea so you could zap people who talk too long, or who yammer on to impress the boss. I like the idea of having meetings standing up, or having them over lunch so at least SOMETHING gets accomplished (you get to eat). Tight agendas, time limits are great. Everyone should read and understand Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” Limits on how many times people can talk in a meeting without permission from the rest of the group or until others are heard, so some bozo doesn’t dominate. If things get delegated quickly, with accountability regarding an outcome by a certain date, so much the better. Most meetings wouldn’t be necessary if people did a bit more pro-active e-mailing and informal small get-togethers by the coffee machine.
Most meetings are unproductive corporate paradises where a gathering of “important” people who singly can do nothing, but together they can decide that nothing productive can be done easily. That’s because most meetings have no single specific actionable objective, time limit and appreciation for silence.
It amounts to two key areas of a company that we all have in some manner been involved. The CEO must foster a culture across and within the company, that should include two way communication up and down the organization, team work across all departments, the willingness to not care about who’s idea it may be, wanting to be successful for the company, reward for the brand and company’s favorable results, and accepting failure at times.
The structure and glue to assist the company’s employees to execute as teams and always for the best, is that culture, through the excellent program of T.Q.M. Hmmmmmmmmm
1. Never force people to come to a meeting;
2. Don’t use meetings to distribute information. Do this ahead of time;
3. To gain attention for a meeting announce a decision and invite any/all to discuss this decision and/or propose alternatives.
4. Have a written/stated purpose for the meeting;
5. Come to a consensus at the end of the meeting, define/assign responsibility.
6. Contact active participants after the meeting and thank them for their input.
7. Contact some of those who came and did not participate and seek their input (why didn’t they participate?).
If you tell people they forget, if you show people they remember and if you involve people they’ll follow it for a lifetime i.e. get your people engaged and don’t drag on with diatribe. Therefore, keep the meeting to 45 minutes (not 1 hour) and break the session into 3 segments:
What’s the issue?
What action is necessary?
What’s the impact expected?
This way you get to achieve something and it’s more fun as it’s fast paced.
It takes considerable amount of sense of security on managers’ part (I would not say leaders, because there are hardly any leaders, most of the executives, no matter how “high powered” are managers) to let employees do, not only thinking, but let them implement their ideas and give credit where it belongs. Unfortunately, in corporate America “thinking” is not considered work, “activity,” no matter how useless is considered work.
Effective meetings are action oriented. Going in, the objectives of the meeting have been clearly and succinctly communicated to every participant, and are clearly related to the larger organizational objectives. Coming out, every participant understands what their take-aways are. And within the meeting, there is a straight line leading from objectives to take-aways. Unfocused meeting, or meetings with ulterior agendas aren’t just unproductive, but ultimately corrode organizational unity and effectiveness.
Brainstorming is by far the most widely used tool to stimulate creative thinking. See several bullets for review and execution.
• When scheduling meeting, be sure to include a brief explanation of the problem and its history. This will help participants prepare mentally for the session and focus on the particular issue. The more specific and focused a session, the better the results will be.
• When inviting individuals to the session, consider people with different backgrounds and degrees of expertise. Sometimes a fresh outlook comes from someone who isn’t considered an expert or close to the problem. However, be careful about mixing management levels. Often in the presence of a senior-level manager, people either will be reluctant to participate or will completely overdo it.
• When scheduling the brainstorming session, the meeting shouldn’t last longer than 30 or 40 minutes. Brainstorming sessions can be tiring and if you haven’t discovered a satisfactory idea after 40 minutes then it’s best to adjourn the meeting. Let the participants leave with the understanding that there will be another session.
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The firms that have the worst meetings are often the same folks who resist change the most. Perhaps the easiest way to improve meetings is to routinely reserve a few minutes at the end of each meeting to ask everyone, “How could we have made this meeting more productive?” Of course, if the boss is totally self-centered or a bully, it’s unlikely that significant improvements will follow.
Fostering the innovative thinking of employees is a fantastic subject. Unfortunately, it is one most leaders are the worst offenders of all employees.
I say this because of my experiences over the years. One of the first lessons I learned early in my career was that the people who do the work are the people to whom you should look for the innovation. This is especially true of employees who are responsible for repeated processes on a constant basis. For example, if a company wishes to understand a better way to build a product for sale or increase the quality with little cost; ask the people who do the work.
They know the product inside and out. The same is true of white collar jobs as well. If a marketer needs to know how to get items to market, talk to the sales department and clients as to the barriers to entry. If a marketer needs to understand what makes their end users buy and how they buy, then either survey, observe but always test and measure your results.
Unfortunately, most at the top have the attitude of no one knows better than they do what the best course of action is and should be.
The top of the house must foster the cooperation, communication and the creative process before the innovation will ever come forth. Then, never hold anyone’s idea up for ridicule. The fastest way to squelch cooperation is to belittle your employees input.
Instead, reward them! Pay them a percentage of the savings or increase in sales. After all they are the ones who actually do the work. You are the leaders. Lead…preferably by example.
Make sure lots of Mountain Dew is available. It got me through Professor Longhair’s lectures and it got me through some long-winded VP meetings. Finally Doron Levy mentioned something on Power Point. Eliminating ineffectual Power Point presentations is a must. I just hate it when some knucklehead VP has to show off his secretary’s animation skills on Power Point. Finally, don’t have VPs and managers in the meetings that have no relevance. Such as those who have “make-work” jobs as a result of some politically correct initiative. When they are present, everyone has to be on guard with what they say and how they say it. When they are out of the room, we can just say what’s on our minds, swear and curse, get to the point quicker, and the meeting will be over sooner.
My thoughts on the concept and use of “meetings”:
1. The sole appropriate purpose of a meeting is to engage multiple people simultaneously in creative problem solving.
2. The critical component is that the problem or situation requires a solution outside any single individual’s control or area of “known” understanding.
3. Essential meeting practices involve initially clearing away the barriers to creative communication by making public all the things the participants “know” to be true. Often many of these are simply beliefs which no longer have value.
4. A “meeting” is a tool by which a “group” produces a joint solution, action plan and timeline for accomplishment.
5. Presentations are not meetings. In very limited practice there is value to making presentations. More often, given technology, there are far more effective and efficient methods of providing information.
6. Conversations are not meetings. Conversations can occur without purpose, and do not involve a shared sense of ownership to produce a solution and then implement that solution. Good meetings often include interactive conversation as a mechanism to better understand suggestions, ideas or concerns.
7. If the objective of the meeting is NOT to further the purpose of a “group,” don’t have the meeting.
8. If the solution to a challenge or problem is within the “known” universe for one or more potential “owners” of the problem, a meeting will not serve a significant purpose.
Overall, meetings are extraordinarily useful in producing breakthrough results to challenges where the solution lies outside of any one individual’s realm of “known” answers. Otherwise, meetings are completely ineffective ways to do things that other management tools do much better.
A couple of quick comments.
– The survey says the average employee spends 5.6 hours in meeting. I think this is the average management employee, which in the retail industry only makes up about 7% of the workforce. The other 93% of these employees would love to have to go to a meeting where someone would get them involved or let them know what is going on.
– To make meeting more effective a few ideas:
1. Have a room with no chairs and tables and lot of white boards.
2. Every meeting must have a starting time and ending time and an agenda.
3. Make sure that you have someone that make sure the meeting stays on track (as someone else suggested a meeting director.
This a good topic, especially for North American retailers who devote every Monday morning to intensive performance reviews throughout the organizational hierarchy. I’ve often felt that this practice would be unnecessary, or dramatically different, with better reporting.
Consider the effort and the IT muscle needed to process weekend sales, roll weekly totals, develop reporting summaries, and feed the ancillary data marts, data warehouse, spread sheets and access tables. As I write this, I am picturing General Merchandise Managers, their divisionals, buyers, each with three to five inches of print outs.
Have they had a chance to digest these tomes? Of course not, if you spend thirty seconds a page on a 300 page report, you’ve spent 2.5 hours. But the meeting starts early.
What is needed is a consistent approach to find problems and opportunities, followed by a systematic approach to respond to them. Basically, the playbook doesn’t have to be reinvented every week. When sales are strong, you bring merchandise in early and aggressively. When sales are weak, you promote. When assortments are thin with strong selling, you broaden. When they are too broad, you thin. When margins are disappointing, you strengthen the mix or get out.
Problem-remedy. You don’t need to waste hundreds of man hours every week where everyone has information, but no one has time to analyze it. Use the computer to analyze and inform and also to suggest what part of the playbook should be used to respond.
Think of hours that would be saved. Think of the forests.
Structure is probably the biggest double edged sword when it comes to meetings. While structure will keep things organized and flowing, it tends to make meetings boring and dry. I think a healthy combination of structure and interactivity is the key to keep participants awake. Especially when trying to sell them a new idea. I usually try to stay away from the standard Power Point presentation and include some role playing or other interactive component. The best advice is to have someone extroverted run the meeting to keep things fresh and lively!
The most common problem with meetings is the misperception about the purpose. A meeting is a method, not an answer or a solution.
Often, there is the tendency for people to react to problems by setting up a meeting. People attend the meeting with little or no preparation and unclear notions about the purpose. This causes frustration and wasted efforts.
Meetings have their purpose. They are excellent for delivering information, training or education, sharing ideas, and agreeing to steps. However, meetings alone seldom result in solutions.
The best idea is to really focus on making meetings–preferably less of them–forums for a free flow of ideas and information. Too many people still work in silos without contact with people in other parts of the organization. People have a tendency to stay in their comfort zones and not get involved in areas with which they are not familiar. Big mistake. Intermingle people and ideas and you can get a potpourri of innovation–not just the same old thinking that is designed to protect one group’s turf.
On another front, people need to know that their ideas won’t be held against them. Too many people keep their mouths and minds shut because they are afraid to say the wrong thing and derail their careers. People who run meetings must make it clear that there are no wrong answers and you will not be held accountable for thinking out loud.
Here are some of my recommended practices for in-house meetings:
1. The best surprise is NO SURPRISE. Announce meetings in advance giving attendees a reasonable amount of time for preparation. Be specific about starting time, location, and state the objectives, or put out a simple meeting agenda, in advance.
2. Facilitator or Moderator is Essential. Someone needs to lead the discussion and be in charge to make sure objectives are met, no matter how informal the meeting. Attendees respond best to some reasonable order and basic organization. The meeting’s leader needs to keep the topics on time, on target, and be sure that each participant is having his or her chance to participate, ask questions, be heard, and be listened to.
3. Start on Time. It’s critical to show and practice respect for everyone’s own time. Meetings that wait for latecomers, or meetings that stop and start, almost always totally lose meaning and impact. Everyone needs to be present at the start, and on-time. After 5 minutes into the start of the meeting, the doors should be closed, even if only figuratively.
4. Environment is an Influence. The surroundings and atmosphere are as critical to perception as packaging and design are critical to a consumer product! Meeting rooms should be kept clean, relevant, uncluttered, bright, and comfortable. Real people are greatly affected by senses.
5. Cell Phones in the meeting are a turn-off! Almost nothing is more frustrating to meeting attendees, no matter how informal, then if the flow is interrupted by someone answering irrelevant cell phone calls during the discussion.
6. Take Notes! Everyone in the meeting should have a pad of paper or a laptop in front of him or her, but one person should be assigned to taking general notes for the entire meeting. Attendees feel more at ease when they know that notes are being taken and will be distributed after the meeting. Of course, this also helps to keep people in line, in a reasonable way, as well.
7. Objectives need to be clear and obvious! When the meeting starts, re-state the meeting’s purpose and tell attendees what to expect, and what needs to be accomplished right here and now. Use visuals, even if informal, and don’t be afraid to moderate, and make changes on the run, but tell people what you are doing, and why.
Meetings are disliked by many people and indeed do cause stress but what bothers me about this is that it doesn’t have to be that way, and in contrast, meetings could be used in a very productive way, to make everyone in the organization better at what they do.
Gawd, I hate meetings. Toys or puzzles are a crackpot idea, and highly unlikely to produce productive results in the real world. What are some people smoking? Really! Tasers might be a good idea so you could zap people who talk too long, or who yammer on to impress the boss. I like the idea of having meetings standing up, or having them over lunch so at least SOMETHING gets accomplished (you get to eat). Tight agendas, time limits are great. Everyone should read and understand Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” Limits on how many times people can talk in a meeting without permission from the rest of the group or until others are heard, so some bozo doesn’t dominate. If things get delegated quickly, with accountability regarding an outcome by a certain date, so much the better. Most meetings wouldn’t be necessary if people did a bit more pro-active e-mailing and informal small get-togethers by the coffee machine.
Most meetings are unproductive corporate paradises where a gathering of “important” people who singly can do nothing, but together they can decide that nothing productive can be done easily. That’s because most meetings have no single specific actionable objective, time limit and appreciation for silence.
It amounts to two key areas of a company that we all have in some manner been involved. The CEO must foster a culture across and within the company, that should include two way communication up and down the organization, team work across all departments, the willingness to not care about who’s idea it may be, wanting to be successful for the company, reward for the brand and company’s favorable results, and accepting failure at times.
The structure and glue to assist the company’s employees to execute as teams and always for the best, is that culture, through the excellent program of T.Q.M. Hmmmmmmmmm
1. Never force people to come to a meeting;
2. Don’t use meetings to distribute information. Do this ahead of time;
3. To gain attention for a meeting announce a decision and invite any/all to discuss this decision and/or propose alternatives.
4. Have a written/stated purpose for the meeting;
5. Come to a consensus at the end of the meeting, define/assign responsibility.
6. Contact active participants after the meeting and thank them for their input.
7. Contact some of those who came and did not participate and seek their input (why didn’t they participate?).
If you tell people they forget, if you show people they remember and if you involve people they’ll follow it for a lifetime i.e. get your people engaged and don’t drag on with diatribe. Therefore, keep the meeting to 45 minutes (not 1 hour) and break the session into 3 segments:
What’s the issue?
What action is necessary?
What’s the impact expected?
This way you get to achieve something and it’s more fun as it’s fast paced.
It takes considerable amount of sense of security on managers’ part (I would not say leaders, because there are hardly any leaders, most of the executives, no matter how “high powered” are managers) to let employees do, not only thinking, but let them implement their ideas and give credit where it belongs. Unfortunately, in corporate America “thinking” is not considered work, “activity,” no matter how useless is considered work.
Effective meetings are action oriented. Going in, the objectives of the meeting have been clearly and succinctly communicated to every participant, and are clearly related to the larger organizational objectives. Coming out, every participant understands what their take-aways are. And within the meeting, there is a straight line leading from objectives to take-aways. Unfocused meeting, or meetings with ulterior agendas aren’t just unproductive, but ultimately corrode organizational unity and effectiveness.
Brainstorming is by far the most widely used tool to stimulate creative thinking. See several bullets for review and execution.
• When scheduling meeting, be sure to include a brief explanation of the problem and its history. This will help participants prepare mentally for the session and focus on the particular issue. The more specific and focused a session, the better the results will be.
• When inviting individuals to the session, consider people with different backgrounds and degrees of expertise. Sometimes a fresh outlook comes from someone who isn’t considered an expert or close to the problem. However, be careful about mixing management levels. Often in the presence of a senior-level manager, people either will be reluctant to participate or will completely overdo it.
• When scheduling the brainstorming session, the meeting shouldn’t last longer than 30 or 40 minutes. Brainstorming sessions can be tiring and if you haven’t discovered a satisfactory idea after 40 minutes then it’s best to adjourn the meeting. Let the participants leave with the understanding that there will be another session.