As a kid, one of my favourite party games was musical chairs - especially at friends' birthday parties as invariably there'd be a prize if yours was the last bum seated.
But I grew older, started to work and learnt that 'musical chairs' is still played in some businesses - although its more about temporarily swapping roles, rather than competing for that prized party gift...
Recently I was fortunate enough to share some of my experiences and insight about various aspects of starting up your own enterprises with a group of students at a start-up boot-camp in Salford. There were a dozen of them, all packed into a small room and had been talked at for most of the day by other experts before I arrived...
Naturally energy levels were dipping, and I picked up that some participants had struggled to relate some of the earlier content of the day to their ideas.
The answer? I got them to play musical chairs - I asked all of them to stand up and go and sit somewhere else before I began. For some, this provoked mild looks of concern: they'd spent so long in the same chair it had moulded itself to the contours of their bum and surely no other chair could be as comfortable...
But very quickly they 'got it' and having a physically different perspective on their classmates and the room meant that they all quickly perked up and seemed to gain a refreshed excitement about engaging in the subject matter.
The lesson from this? Everyone who spends time regularly sitting in the same chair or position to engage in their work should periodically move to another desk or sit on the other side of the room. Gaining a renewed excitement for what you do can be as cheap and easy as changing the way you physically look at it - so what's stopping you? Start rearranging the future today!
