10 Rules to Keep Creative Meetings Creative
There’s nothing worse than a creative meeting that destroys creativity.
I’ve seen this happen. I’ve caused it to happen.
Whether you’re a business leader hoping to improve a product design or a pastor designing a church service experience, opening the creative funnel is required to leverage a team’s creativity. Unfortunately, it’s too easy to limit creativity than create space for it.
How can you ensure creativity remains present in your creative meetings?
Try establishing creative team meeting rules. These rules aren’t suggestions but guardrails to ensure you or another team member don’t eliminate creativity.
10 Creative Meeting Rules
1. Don’t kill a bad idea too soon.
Bad ideas often birth spectacular breakthroughs. There are no bad ideas at the beginning of the process. Yes, there are bad ideas for sure. Any bad idea that makes it to implementation is a mistake. This is a “creative meeting,” not an “execution planning session,” therefore, bad ideas are allowed.
Rules 2 – 10 are available in the post.
I Start Every Meeting With The Same Question
What happened recently that makes you feel you’re accomplishing your mission and vision?
I love that question. I love it so much I begin every single meeting, lunch, coffee, or gathering at Watermarke with this one question.
At our staff meeting today, I began (as usual) with this question. The answers brought both cheers and tears! Here is a sampling:
One answer involved a brand new unbeliever who had not been to any church in decades. A few weeks ago, she walked into Watermarke for the first time. It just so happened we were launching a new Starting Point group that week, and she decided to give it a shot (you can read more about Starting Point HERE). Her life is changing, and she has not missed a single week of the group! That’s worth celebrating.
Our high school (InsideOut) ministry is at their summer camp. We celebrated how many students and leaders attended this year and what we have already seen happen in some of their lives over the past five days. That’s mission success.
Our elementary team (UpStreet) created an amazing summer competition with our children based on inviting new friends to Watermarke. We shared several of their stories, including some who had invited literally dozens of friends throughout the month of June!
We even shared how a staff member from another campus location came to Watermarke on Sunday morning to help run sound when our sound engineer showed up with a 103 degree fever.
There were several more…
Sure, in every meeting, there are lots of things to cover. And this question can at times take half the meeting. But whether I’m meeting individually with a direct report, with our staff team, or with a volunteer team, I begin the meeting with this one question. Here’s why:
