We often consider ourselves lucky if we’re on a team with little conflict and minimal office politics. When a team works together for a long time, they find a rhythm of collaborating and fall into regular patterns of behavior, minimizing disagreements. But over time, this habitual way of working can limit the team’s performance. We don’t often step back to assess if the team dynamics that we consider “good” are getting in the way of generating breakthrough ideas and results.

For instance, think about your last team meeting. Did everyone get along? Could you predict who was going to speak up and what they were going to say? Was there any disagreement? Do you feel you heard from everyone, or just a select few?

How you interact as a team impacts how you think about your business. If your team’s interactions are becoming predictable or languishing in a flat line, it might be time to stir things up. Just as boiling water changes state from liquid to gas, innovating at work requires us to raise the temperature — to boil water at work.

Raising the temperature in your team meetings means creating enough productive tension through diversity and dissension to stimulate different ideas. Most of us want to (too) quickly drive to consensus and quash divergent points of view before they even surface. Holding out on converging in itself is uncomfortable. Bringing up ideas against the organization’s conventional thinking, is difficult. But inserting a pause to think differently provides necessary provocation to up our game.

To break stale habits in your team and raise the temperature in your meetings, use four key strategies.

[Here are the first two.]

Be grounded in purpose.

Creating productive tension is dangerous and messy work. The only reason to risk being on the edge and inviting others to join you there is for the right purpose.

Be explicit about the reason you are raising the heat, so others don’t accuse you of taking potshots at the team or questioning their work. You could say, “If our purpose is to double our numbers this year, the thinking that leads us to our current figures is unlikely to transform our results. Let’s change the way we’re interacting and brainstorming ideas.” Reminding yourself and others about purpose keeps the focus on what the group is trying to achieve and reduces hurt feelings and drama.

Describe behavioral data.

Observe what behaviors are flying under the radar in your meetings. For example, I have mentioned during several executive retreats, “In all four breakout groups women took notes and men presented.” Or I might say, “After two hours in this session, 17 of 43 people have not yet spoken.” These are small interventions that increase awareness of the dynamics in the room.

The data often reveal patterns: who opens the conversation, reactions to specific individuals, who interrupts whom and when. Call out patterns with specific data points, such as, “In the last 30 minutes, whenever someone from the production group has spoken, they have been interrupted by an engineer,” or “I’ve noticed that each time someone brings up the schedule delay, someone else immediately offers an explanation, but no one offers a solution.” By illuminating the data and the patterns at play, you help the group check assumptions, break out of their ruts, and increase creativity.