Blog Post
An idea is kind of like a plant—the environment that it’s grown in has a massive impact on the quality of its fully developed state. And just like a plant requires nutritious soil to grow up strong and healthy, the best ideas flourish in meeting environments that genuinely foster creativity. So how do you develop a meeting culture that consistently breeds innovation and quickly sprouts ideas as strong as the mighty bamboo of Kyoto? Let’s take a look at the layout.
PICK THE PROPER POT
It’s arguable that an empty room is ideal for creative thought, but we’ve learned that adding a little life along your walls can serve as the spark to one’s imagination. Step into our office and you’ll see imagery such as cross-sections of the human brain, tools for scientific experimentation, and bolts of electricity. Stroll into one of our meeting spaces, and you’ll see more of the same: visual reminders of our ambitions, our curiosity, and our culture.
Take the Red Room for example. A glimpse inside reveals the likenesses of exceptional thinkers like Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Carl Sagan. And sometimes, just seeing their faces can jolt our ideation and galvanize us to strive for greatness and originality. In the Orange Room, poetry written by our own team members enlivens the walls and reminds us that even the relatively mundane can be imbued with passion and meaning. In short, the physical spaces in which you meet and brainstorm can have a positive—or negative—impact on your creative process. So take a look around your meeting space and decide if it promotes the kind of creativity in thought that you desire.
WATER THE SEEDS
In many meetings, potentially extraordinary ideas never germinate simply because they’re never shared, so it’s critical to establish an environment that urges your team to take creative leaps of faith and rewards them for doing so. Presenting new ideas in a room full of people can be daunting, but it can be far less so in an atmosphere that explicitly encourages ambition, risk, and even failure, so as long as it’s in attempt to produce the best possible end product. Atmospheres as such are emboldening, and they can help provide a sense of freedom and security that engenders remarkable ideas and solutions.
At NogginLabs, we celebrate and seek bold, pioneering ideas with tremendous verve. So if you offer up a great idea, it’s properly recognized by the team in real time, and you’re inspired and encouraged to keep them coming. Naturally, not all ideas are hits, and if you present a relative dud, that’s OK. It happens to the best of us, and the duds often set up the best punchlines. The important thing is that you’re comfortable presenting your ideas without the fear of failure, because everyone understands that sometimes it’s those failed ideas that lead to the biggest breakthroughs.
NURTURE YOUR GREEN EAR
Establishing a meeting environment in which new ideas are freely and comfortably presented is ideal, but it’s equally important to create a space that values active listening. Too often, the natural inclination in a creative meeting is to speak almost solely for the sake of saying something—anything. But active listening is criminally underrated. Active listening is akin to using another person’s ideas to fill your mind as a sort of creative kindling that even the weakest spark can light into a blazing inferno of innovation. And so often, it’s those collaborative fires that blaze the trail towards a beautiful solution that may never have been discovered otherwise.
But it’s not just about actively listening to your own team members; it’s actively listening to clients and everything else that’s going on in the world around you. What happens in our meetings is often influenced by what happens outside of them. We pride ourselves on keeping our ears to the ground and catching word of any novel approach that can inspire us to create the best learning experiences possible—and then we openly share those approaches in our meetings and let them snowball. And there’s no way we could do that if we never closed our mouths and simply listened from time to time.
