Know-How Exchange : Strategy

How about planning a game for some of the meetings that has an interesting learning outcome or moral for the business? It could be figuring out the mystery ingredient or taking an assessment to understand different thinking styles. It could also be a new brainstorming method that gets everyone involved solving a problem or coming up with new ideas for a project. For lots of brainstorming ideas and variety, you can look at www.brainstorming-that-works.com. For thinking style assessments that lead to fun discussions that are also learning to work with different styles check out www.karlalbrecht.com or www.brainiance.com, www.hbdi.com.
How nice that you can have your meetings in a coffee shop. That is a great start.
Hazel Wagner

I like to suggest, to my clients, that we create an event that requires people to work in teams for a charitable cause. It not only creates team spirit it land gives everyone pride in what they are doing. Given your company, I would think this could be creating and or packaging food gift packages to be provided to the needy. You can do this through a local food bank or other charity.

Make it a completion, such as the team that packages the most food wins something.

Take a "challenge" from Top Chef and have bowls of spices and other ingredients for the consultants to taste. Have the consultants guess what each ingredient is. Consultant who gets the most ingredients correct wins a prize. Always great to have prizes at these meetings.

Hi Stephanie

First off - are you paying the consultants to be there?

If not - then I can understand that they may not want to pay for some of the 'games' suggested by others...
if you are paying for them to be there then it is a different thing..

Do you have an agenda? does it have stated desired outcomes? do you stick to them? is one of the stated objectives 'to have fun' or 'to laugh a lot'

what gets measured gets done...
good luck
Mike