Meeting Shmeeting
The “traditional meeting” isn’t the best place to generate ideas. If you’re going the traditional route, you’ll often need a pre-meeting, the actual meeting, the follow-up meeting, the regroup, and a planning meeting to discuss the next meeting. Then you have to ask yourself, “did we really get anything done other than win the comfy conference room war?” Plus, that’s at least 5 hours of your time you can’t get back. The marketplace is changing everyday. Exciting innovations in technology means that we have to become more innovative offline as well.
Un-Meet for the best ideas
As a solution, un-meet and try enacting a Giving Circle of Ideas. In traditional giving circles, participants pool individual funds for a larger community good. Funds are collected during a specified period and the group decides to donate those funds to a charity or other community project. A tight giving timeline is presented (i.e. monthly) to maximize the impact of the giving circles throughout the year. https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2017/06/02/giving-circles-u-s-grow-mean-institutional-philanthropy/
Giving Circle of Ideas exercise
In a similar spirit, a Giving Circle of Ideas pools ideas to solve at least 1 business challenge. The tight timeline, a 1-hour meeting per idea, maximizes idea generation and kills analysis paralysis. How do you execute it? I’m glad you asked.
Solicit 1 big challenge from each of your team members. Set your meeting for an hour. Pick a challenge out of a hat. Take 5 minutes to present the challenge. Have your meeting participants disperse and use your typical brief to solve it. They only have 40 minutes. Come back together with 15 minutes to spare. Lay your briefs on the table. Have a few people share their ideas. The person who submitted the selected challenge gets to leave with all the briefs. The ideas will be great, mediocre, and bad. No matter what, the team member gets a great start to adding more depth to the ideas that rise to the top.
Giving Circle of Ideas adaptations
The Giving Circle of Ideas can be adjusted for your internal process. For example, two hours could help you get a breadth of ideas related to two challenges. Depending on the size of your team, you might want to tackle 2 or 3 ideas in an hour. It can also serve as a cross-functional team kick-off. Make it work for you.
Keep in touch
If you found this helpful, please like, and share. If you decide to give it a try, I’d love to hear how it’s working out. If you’d like more help getting your own Giving Circle Of Ideas going, feel free to contact us at https://www.grounded-strategy.com
