The “bad idea” strategy of eliciting good ideas
I’ve come to believe that the best way to spurn innovation into your department is to make your organization ready for innovation. There are a lot go ways to do this; I particularly like mandatory independent continuing education days for staff on Fridays (as long as they have no other pressing duties). An additional strategy involves being the first to do something risky to make it easier for a second person to jump in.
Step back for a second and think of what a profile of an innovator is. We think of an innovator as a Steve Jobs-type person, who comes in and dictates product style and form factor from on high. But an innovative leader isn’t necessarily the guy with all the brilliant ideas — the innovative leader should be the person who can elicit new ideas, bring them to the floor for discussion, and give them all a fair shake.
Over the years, I’ve adopted a peculiar strategy to get people to offer the thoughts they’ve been too scared to mention. Whether through fear of judgment or lack of desire to contribute, it seems that a lot of people don’t like to offer up ideas for assessment.
Sometimes, as a leader, you need to be able to offer potentially bad ideas to get good ideas. That is, during a brainstorm session, you just say, “I have a potentially bad idea. What if we do X?”
Please note that it can’t be a genuinely untenable idea. You can’t insult your audience like that. The bad idea has to be mostly doable, but with a couple outstanding questions or unknown elements. Most leaders have a ton of these ideas just sitting around. Use them as kindling for the brainstorm fire.
Invariably, if you have a group where open discussion is promoted, someone will shoot your idea down by saying it can’t be done. That’s fine. But it’s when you start the flow of bad ideas, sometimes, that ordinarily tight-lipped people will think, “well, that’s a bad idea. I have a better one to offer.” And now you’re off to the races with a real brainstorm session. This follows that TEDx concept pretty much everyone has seen before about the first follower being more important than the leader. Make the platform ripe for that first follower to come forward.
It’s extremely important to get over that fear, as a leader, that you cannot ruin a record of perfect decision-making and excellent opinions. Just get yourself dirty sometimes, in strategy sessions, and throw out some bad ideas about pushing out of that box your org is in.
You also need to consider your position of authority when you lead a brainstorm session. If I don’t offer the caveat that the idea is potentially bad, people may confuse an idea to be analyzed with a dictate to be obeyed. It is always key that I promote the process of the open discussion floor and the fair shake.
Does that make sense? Does anyone else do this?
