Tips on running a constructive braining storming session needed please!

[fridayschild]

A team I run at work isn't making enough money. I need a brainstorming session with the team to talk about how we work better and smarter with each other and with our client.

I do understand that part of the meeting is them telling me that they are overworked and underpaid, and I need to just take a bit of stick on that point. But there's going to be no pay rises or head count increases unless we can make a bit more money.

Part of the problem lies with our clients too. I'm happy to record those issues, and see if I can get the clients to change their behaviours too. However that's harder than changing things here!

In an ideal world I'd like everyone to go away positive and enthused, and have a clear list of things we can achieve that will help. Any suggestions?

Have you tried Edward de Bono's six hats? It's a way of getting people to think about problems from different perspectives and can be a really useful way of flushing out creative ideas.

There's an explanation of how it works here

It's going to be hard to have a single meeting which both allows people to have a really good moan and lets you respond to that, and which then switches to creative mode. The problem can be that people get stuck in 'moaning mode' (especially if you're welcoming their moans, because that way it feels that bringing up problems is the appropriate response in this meeting), and can't switch to coming up with weird ideas without immediately thinking of why they wouldn't work.

I think the six hats is a good idea, but I think that you really need to hold more than one meeting - one at which you recognise the problems they have, and another in which you hold a constructive brainstorming session, at which no-one can talk about why other people's ideas won't work. You then come back together to talk about what might and might not work, and how some of the problems might be overcome.

A colleague has a tip that if you hear a couple of negative responses ("that won't work because") in your brainstorming session, you need to end it at that point, because it will persuade everybody else that the appropriate and responsible thing to do in your brainstorming session is to be negative.

I had thought of a variation on the six hats if the moaning gets too much. I was going to bring out a hat (I think I have a pirate hat at home) and say that the person wearing it must be devil's advocate and every one else must only have positive ideas. After 5 minutes the hat moves.

This would have the effect of keeping the one particular moaning minnie quiet except when she was wearing the hat.

but I do see that getting people to switch modes could be tricky. They all had a good gripe in their appraisals recently so I might just tell them they have had their moan and now is the time to move on. Will think too about more than one hat.

Thanks to you both.