Another brainstorming session, another slew of tired ideas, and now your team is in a rut. What can you do about it? How can you push everyone to be more creative? Here are some suggestions.

To get a team's creative juices flowing again:
1. Diagnose and fix any obvious problems. Think about when, where and how your team has been innovative in the past. Can you recreate that environment or group dynamic?
2. Focus your team's attention. Open brainstorming sessions with lofty goals like generating "500 New Ideas" are fine in theory, but in practice they are often ineffective and inefficient. Instead, direct your team's attention toward solving a narrow problem – for example, ways to fix a specific customer issue.
3. Bring in different points of view. Most of us tend to live in filtered worlds – we read the same newspapers and magazines, listen to the same news and have lunch with the same people. Create opportunities to expose your team to different perspectives and points of view.
4. Share relatable examples of success. The Steve Jobs-Mark Zuckerberg-Richard Branson "genius" innovation narrative is omnipresent in business blogs, books and magazines. For relatable inspiration, offer success stories that are closer to home.
5. Conquer your team's fear of failure. One of the most common reasons for stagnation is not your team's lack of ideas but their fear that the ones they have aren't any good. This fear of failure is so pervasive that many employees choose not to voice or champion their opinions, which, of course, hinders innovation.
6. Create avenues for ideas to have an impact. Ideas only matter if you act on them.
7. Avoid using the word "innovation." Instead of the i-word, encourage your team by using language that's meaningful to them.
In association with Harvard Business Review