digest
Short Summary
Main recommendation: Find and empower early adopters inside your organization, connect them with each other, and then prime the pump with structured idea generation sessions where people are asked for bad ideas, given a clear vision and vector, and asked to produce 15 ideas each in 48 hours. Speaker Simon Sinek presents this as a way to build risk tolerance and generate ideas that can actually be executed.
Key Points
- Early adopters will show up, but they often won't take the next step on their own, so leaders have to give direction.
- Tell early adopters they are not alone, and introduce them to each other, especially in large companies, so they form cross-organization alliances that raise risk tolerance.
- Prime idea generation by giving instructions and examples yourself, then sharing the best ideas from others so the initiative spreads without you.
- Ask for deliberately bad ideas in brainstorms, since they can be seeds of great ideas and early judgment kills them.
- Use a no-judgment "dog pile" report-out with green, yellow, and red sorting, then execute the green ideas.
- Assign roles based on strengths: idea generators and executors are often different people.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions:
- Introduce early adopters to one another directly, for example: "You know who I need to introduce you to? Do me a favor and go have lunch with this person."
- Rename employee of the month to "innovator of the month," and choose people who embody the values rather than just those who are good.
- Ask recognized people to bring someone else who "gets it" to the next meeting.
- Give the team a clear vision and vector, state what you don't know how to achieve, and ask each person for 15 ideas within 48 hours, working alone or in pairs of no more than two.
- Tell participants you want bad ideas and every idea, not only their best ones.
- In the report-out, let each person share two or three ideas; if someone else already said your idea, cross it off your list (a Boggle-style rule), with no scoring and no competition.
- Keep senior leaders out of the dog pile and idea generation so no one gets shot down; avoid comments like "That's not viable," "too expensive," or "we tried that."
- Sort ideas into green (executable quickly with little or no money), yellow (a bit more time and money), and red (a lot of time and money, not qualitative), then execute the greens people like.
- Speaker's example: at an offsite the team had an hour and a half for the exercise.
- Speaker's observation: the 11th, 12th, and 13th ideas per person were often the most valuable.
- Speaker's observation: his best idea generators were often poor executors, while his "no idea" people were strong executors.
Bottom Line
Idea generation works when leaders deliberately create safe, structured, judgment-free space, connect the people willing to take risks, and then match idea generators and executors to the work instead of expecting one person to do both.
