If you had the power to ban any term from meetings, which one would you choose? Roger Martin from Ideo suggests banning: “Prove it.”
The people who use it believe they are being responsible and protecting the company from untested ideas and perhaps deadly risks. The problem is that they are essentially insulating their company from new ideas and radical innovations. “Simply put, no new thing in this world has ever been proven in advance analytically.”
This is not to say that you should blindly plunge into the future and hope for the best. You need to find a more productive balance between wiping out new ideas just because they’re new and, on the other hand, blindly embracing them for the same reason.
But there’s more to it than that.
The skills you need to bring your ideas to the executive table: top-notch problem-solving skills, articulate and confident communication, recognizing complex problems and critically analyzing them, weighing various risks, challenges and implications – are the exact opposite of what your team needs from you to come up with new ideas.
Good ideas require both creativity and analytical scrunity.
However, the order is important: if you apply too much analysis and evaluation to the concept from the outset, you will limit the possibilities instead of expanding them.
The process of turning a concept into reality is inherently iterative. You will have the opportunity to critically evaluate the idea at some point; however, doing so too early will kill the initiative and ownership, not the risks associated with it.
- Start by asking open-ended questions. Your goal is to inspire more ideas and viewpoints, not fewer.
- Replace the urge to explain and pass on information with curiosity. “Tell me more” and “How might we” are far more inspiring than “a few feedback points”.
- If you work in a risk-averse environment, encourage making ideas tangible early on. Put them in front of people and improve the product. Instead of dissecting it analytically, gain the proof you need by building it and gathering feedback.
The concept may fail, but your team will succeed. If the concept is successful but the team is discouraged, you’ve failed no matter what the outcome.
