Great ideas don’t always start in meetings — they start over coffee.

Not because coffee is magic.

And not because meetings are pointless.

But because coffee changes the conditions.

Meetings are often built for answers: updates, decisions, clarity, action. They’re structured, time-bound, and purposeful. Useful — but sometimes that structure narrows thinking too early. We start performing, presenting, defending. The safest ideas rise first. The interesting ones stay quiet.

Coffee does something different.

It creates a softer space where thinking can loosen. Where half-formed thoughts are allowed to exist without being judged. Where someone can say, “I’m not sure this is the real problem,” and it doesn’t feel like disruption — it feels like progress.

There’s a reason so many organisations miss the “watercooler moment” in hybrid work. Informal interaction matters. Proximity and chance conversation can increase collaboration and make it easier for ideas to move between people. Research from MIT has even shown how physical proximity increases the likelihood of collaboration (see: MIT: proximity and collaboration).

It’s also why walking helps. A Stanford study found that walking boosts creative thinking compared to sitting — sometimes the mind simply needs a different state to think in (see: Stanford: walking boosts creativity).

So here’s a small practice:

Swap one meeting this week for a coffee.

Or a 20-minute walk-and-talk.

Don’t bring solutions. Bring one better question:

• “What are we not saying?”

• “What’s making this feel heavy?”

• “If we weren’t trying to be right, what would we try?”

Creativity rarely disappears. It narrows under pressure — and returns when the conditions soften.

Sometimes that’s all it takes.