How to stop having ideas

As I become more 'senior' I realise that the biggest contribution I can make to my team is to stop bothering them with my ideas.

Here's why:

Ideas are bad

Ideas are incredibly easy to have. People are having them all the time. I remember in agency-land we used to have this rhetoric about ideas being precious and then employ pairs of junior people on almost minimum wage to have hundreds of them per week.

The hard things around ideas are:

• Deciding which ones to execute (ie sorting good from bad) and
• Executing them well

More ideas just make this problem worse. They are a distraction and they encourage the natural tendency people and organisations have to make things more complicated:

"Leidy Klotz, an engineering and architecture professor at the University of Virginia, has shown that humans reflexively add in order to solve problems—more people, more money, more features, etc.—even when subtracting is better. In the simplest demonstration in Klotz’s research, adults were given a Lego structure that needed to be strengthened in order to hold a masonry brick over the head of a Star Wars stormtrooper action figure. Each problem solver could earn money by completing the task, but there was a catch: Every Lego piece they added reduced their reward. And yet, most added multiple pieces even though removing just a single, obviously precarious piece would have solved the problem instantly."

Inside the Box - David Epstein

For 'more people, more money, more features' read 'more ideas'.

My ideas are worse

Wikipedia:

Brandolini's law (or the bullshit asymmetry principle) is an Internet adage coined in 2013 by Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini. It compares the considerable effort of debunking misinformation to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. The adage states:

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

The challenge of refuting bullshit does not come just from its time-consuming nature, but also from the challenge of defying and confronting one's community.

I would propose a related law for organisations.

The amount of energy needed to refute an idea from your boss is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

The challenge of refuting those ideas does not come just from its time consuming nature, but also form the challenge of defying and confronting one's boss.

I'm now a 'senior leader'. Senior leaders have a lot of ideas. They occur to us in meetings, or when we're reading the board papers or are inspired by something we saw on TikTok this morning. They're not normally very good. They're not grounded in lived operational experience or regular contact with customers. They're not based in deep awareness of the trade-offs and frictions surrounding the ideas you're currently executing. They're just some ideas we've had.

Nevertheless, we're mad keen to tell you about them.

We'll caveat it, as 'just a suggestion', 'just something to think about'. 'just a thought, don't spend too long on it', blissfully (or willfully) ignoring all the power dynamics at play.

I was in a trustee meeting a little while ago and I heard one of the trustees say to the CEO "I know you've said you've done X, but have you thought about doing X?" The compunction to suggest ideas is so strong that, although they'd heard the CEO say that they'd tried something, and acknowledged that they'd heard it, they still, in the same sentence, went on to suggest the idea of doing the self-same thing.

And I was inches away from suggesting the same thing myself.

It has of late, of course, got much, much worse because those ideas are often now accompanied by an 87-slide Claude deck which also needs refuting.

I do the same thing when asked for coffee and advice. I really have to work hard not to give them ideas. It's so tempting. They're so easy to come up with when you don't have any context or responsibility. And, of course, they don't want my stupid ideas. They've been thinking about their issues for ages. They've had all the useful ideas. They just want to be helped, hugged or heard.

Ideas ≠ help

I go into meetings and try to think: "these are busy and expensive people, is my idea really so good that they should stop doing what they're currently doing and refute it or execute it?"

It doesn't work that often. I'm always suggesting stuff.

But my current team and I have developed a subtle dance. If they think it's good they'll do it. If they don't they'll just ignore it. Sometimes I'm dumb enough to think they've just not heard me so I'll suggest it again. Maybe they'll do it this time, but mostly they ignore it again. I don't tend to suggest things a third time.