Getting unstuck - and quick!
It was mid Friday morning in August a few years ago, 35km from Munich. I’d been hired to facilitate an ideas session with two members of a company’s leadership team. We’d spent the morning so far in a small, nondescript meeting room on the company’s office campus.
We’d made good progress but needed a breakthrough. The clock was ticking. At 2pm a car was coming to take me back to the airport. We needed to get creatively unstuck!
I knew there were two things that could make a difference. My killer combination: a coffee and a walk!
“Is there somewhere we can go for coffee?” I asked and was told there was a coffee station down the hallway. That wasn’t quite what I had in mind. But then another option emerged - we could walk across the campus to another building which has a decent cafeteria in the lobby. Much better.
As we strolled in the sunshine down a quiet country road to the other building, the rhythm altered. We stopped to notice a herd of cows in a field (this was the photograph I took that morning). There was small talk, banter and observations. We grabbed our coffees and sat outside.
Everything changed. The ideas flowed. Outside of the soulless meeting room, freshly charged with coffee and fresh air, relaxed in the sunshine, our creative vision took shape. We had what we were looking for.
Coming up with ideas against the clock is hard. Especially in an uninspiring room. But getting up and out, letting those creative juices flow, having a good coffee to signal a shift in the brain - then the magic happens.
