Use “Creativity Light” to Spur Unusual Ideas at Meetings

Traditional tactics to spur creativity at meetings tend to be serious. Lighten the mood and watch the perspective change the next time you summon your team to look at an issue from a new perspective.

Here are 6 non-traditional ways to ignite ideas and turn creativity loose:

1. An hour before the meeting, send your team a notification (using the BoostHQ App!) telling them briefly about the situation you need their input on. Then challenge them to bring their worst possible idea into the boardroom at the appointed hours. Tell them you are giving them lots of time to work on it, so bring what they are pretty sure just won’t work and be ready to explain why it won’t.
2. Call a brainstorming session. When your team arrives, make sure each place around the table has Play-doh, potato chips and candy. Tell them it’s not fair that kids have more fun than adults when adults have more power, so it’s time to take back the power. In the process, as they eat and create things with clay, ask what they think would make your product or service more fun again.
3. Use a really great incentive. Arrange for tickets for two to an upcoming concert, a weekend getaway or a week’s all-expense trip to somewhere fun, depending on what your corporate budget can handle. Then bring the team in to discuss a solution for a problem the company is wrestling with. Best idea of the day, as judged by a panel of three managers, gets to take the prize home.
4. Grab a mini-bus, grab your best creative team and head to a city park to walk in nature and hold a walking meeting. Brainstorm amid the trees and flowers to encourage your team to look at life differently from there.
5. Get used to walking into a department, selecting at random five workers, telling them they have two minutes to tell you what they would do next if they were running the company. They have a maximum of one minute to talk. Give out pizza tickets so that those workers can take their families to supper for participating. Sometimes the best ideas are the ones you come up with the fastest!
6. If you have a team that is used to working together for a long time, bring them to a meeting and ask them to start by telling the person on their right something they are grateful for that has happened since knowing them. It can be humorous; it can be serious; it can be sarcastic. It doesn’t matter, the idea is that they need to think briefly about someone else. The theory is that such a transition makes the team member predisposed to have a different perspective on the company.

Creativity in the work environment is critical for its success. Make sure you take the time to do little things everyday to encourage creativity amongst your employees.