My team meetings are just people taking turns talking with no real thinking together. How do I change that?
When a meeting is a series of updates delivered one after another, and nobody disagrees and nobody builds on anyone else, you have coordination but not thinking. The group is sharing information, not making anything smarter than what each person walked in with. A team's real power is that many minds can reach what one cannot, and that power is going unused. The reason is usually not that your people cannot think. It is that the meeting was never set up to ask them to. If the whole ritual is take your turn and report, that is exactly what they will do. Silence and agreement are not signs that everyone concurs. They are signs that no one was invited to do anything else. Change what the room is for. Bring one genuine question with real stakes and no obvious answer, and ask people to think it through together, out loud. Invite disagreement openly, and protect the person who offers it. It will feel slow and awkward at first. That awkwardness is thinking starting up. Stay with it, and the meeting becomes something more than a relay of updates.