Helping your team develop fresh ideas

Are your staff meetings sounding like the same-old, same-old? Is the group retreading over the same solutions for the same problems? If you want to shake things up a bit, here are some quick ideas for helping your team develop fresh ideas:

• Form a book club. Choose a relevant text and incorporate a discussion of one chapter into each staff meeting until you're all the way through it.
• Take a field trip. Go see a competitor's operation, or a noncompetitor in a similar industry. Or for that matter, visit a business that's barely like yours at all. You'll still find some transferable ideas, and if they come from a completely new frame of reference they're likely to freshen things up for you.
• Go to a conference. See what's new and have the opportunity to network with other businesses to find out what's working for them.
• Join a customer's trade association. If you really want to develop customer loyalty you can do so best by standing in their shoes. Find out what their issues are and you can better develop solutions for them. And you might meet some other potential customers in the process...
• Bring in a guest speaker. Find an authority on the subject of concern and pick their brain. (That concept looks kind of creepy in print - maybe I need a new metaphor!)
• Scour the blogs. If you're reading this you already are checking out the blogosphere, but try the blog carnivals if you want a lot of content on a particular subject.
• Send your team home to play with their kids. Believe it or not, when I was a kid my dad developed a patent for the cold extrusion of metal by playing with my brother and me and our Play-Doh Fun Factory! Kids use different tools, and they're not restricted by the same number of assumptions as adults are.
• Rock the boat. Change something. Rearrange the desks so people work adjacent to somebody new. Be open to the concept of discomfort and a bit of storming. It's said that if the boat isn't rocking it probably isn't moving forward, either.