Hyper-Creativity is impossible without great team meetings.
Today creativity has to do with great team work.

How can you boost your meeting and build incredible creative energy in your team ?

Meetings are for essential communication, exchanges and using decision tools adapted to today’s business life. Whatever the situation and the goal, three success factors contribute heavily to the success of a meeting:

• Focus
• Energy
• Alignment

Most managers admit these three capital ingredients are lacking in most meetings and that it’s difficult for them to manage focus + energy + alignment.

Find here some very practical tips that will enhance your performance:

1Concentrate energies with a clear and shared goal

When preparing the meeting, clarify your goal very precisely and inform the participants when inviting them. You will save time and gain in effectiveness and commitment.

2The art of breaking ice

Even with colleagues it’s important to break ice, to make the difference between daily work and your meeting. It’s your responsibility to bring them “on board”: you have to get their intellectual, emotional, and even physical involvement. Check if your team is really present and not with their mind somewhere else.

3Reinforce your key-message

Of course you should have one ... Do not hesitate to repeat it, two, three, four times during the meeting. It’s very useful to ask people to rephrase what they have understood. Let them express your idea with their words, images, symbols, figures. It’s also a good source of information for you.

4Do not kill them with Powerpoint!

Powerpoint is a great presentation tool, if you use it to give power to your key point. Powerpoint is not, should never be a prompter! It’s a speech enhancer! Do you have a lot of figures to communicate, sophisticated charts to explain, complex data to share? Give the participants a paper copy! Powerpoint is not effective for heavy presentations: it has to be light, inspiring and dynamic.

5Be there the first ... and in advance

Being in advance is a critical success factor! Do you imagine Michael Schumacher jumping in his car two minutes before the start of the Formula One Grand Prix or a great pianist arriving five minutes before his or her performance at the Opera? No, of course not!  Be in the meeting room before the others to have the time to install everything, to check your computer, the cables and the data projector, to see if the markers are working, if there is enough paper at the paperboard. All details, but details make the difference. In your meeting room, as on a F1 racecourse or at the opera details are not just details; they are part of the performance.

6Your safety pack

Great performers always carry their safety pack with them. As a meeting professional – isn’t this where great managers make all of the difference? – carry post-its, markers, films with you and of course your wireless presenter. Be prepared for the unexpected!

7A brand new tool for your meetings: Papershow ®

With the paperboard and the BARCO data projector, Papershow® is one of the three major inventions in the history of meetings. 

How does it work ? Papershow® is a block of paper, a pen and a USB key.

Everything you write on your Papershow® paper block with the pen is immediately visible on your computer screen and on the meeting room screen. The first time you see it, it’s pure magic! 

And you can write and draw in black, green, red, blue, yellow and white. You can even form circles and squares, or put post-it on the screen on an absolutely flexible way.

Last but least you may also import your PowerPoint presentation, so that you can “write live” on your figures, charts, etc. You can add circles, symbols, comments of the participants. Your PowerPoint presentation becomes an interactive presentation!

At the end of the meeting you can immediately send the Papershow® documents with all the comments to the participants in a PowerPoint or PDF format. Make your choice, it’s just a click...Forget about the minutes and other annoying and time-consuming tasks.

Papershow® has changed our life at Yellow Ideas. We use it in presentations, in brainstorms, in strategic meetings, in one-to-one discussion. We use it standing in front of our audience or sitting with the participants. 

To know more : www.papershow.com

8Movement is key!

If you want energy in your meeting, you have to move people. Ask them to change the setting of the room, to do a physical exercise, to express their mood with a movement, etc. Be creative, do not leave them sitting for hours!

9Align your team on actions!

A great meeting finishes with an enthusiastic action plan! You are in charge of calling on the energy of participants at the end of the meeting for the very next steps. Involve everybody.  “Who? What? When? Why? How? How much?” are your allies at this moment. Use them!

10Quitting is also an art!

Do not let people leave your meeting without a great “Good bye!”, “Wow!”, “Fantastic!”. They have to leave your meeting full of energy. A meeting starts with an ice-breaker; it should end with a fire! The last minute of your meeting is not to be thrown away: it’s the most important time! So prepare that very special minute!

Abstract from Mark Raison’s “What a Meeting Seminar”.

To know more about this programme, contact Mark at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it