If you’ve ever worked in a team setting, this is a situation you’ve no doubt encountered more than once. At one of the team meetings, the leader of the group initiates a discussion to come up with some new ideas to help improve or build on the team’s current efforts. Although at first, only one or two team members step up with some ideas to share with the group, eventually the discussion encourages the participation of everyone as they debate and discuss the merits of all the ideas being put forth.
Through the course of this lively discussion, a select few ideas are embraced by the majority of the team participants and by the end of the meeting, everyone in the team is feeling pretty good about themselves in thinking about the benefits the team will derive from these new ideas. After a few weeks have passed, the team leader calls a follow-up meeting to find out where things stand When it’s discovered that little or no work has been started on the ideas discussed at the previous meeting, a new session of brainstorming begins over how to make these ideas easier to implement.
After reading this, I’m sure you can appreciate how absurd this sounds. And yet, as most of us know only too well, this doesn’t stop it from happening on a regular basis both in businesses settings and elsewhere. So what’s going on here? Well, what I see at issue here are two factors – click here to read the rest of this piece on Frank Dickinson’s blog.