Blog #3 Idea ownership - Should we care? Yes and No.

Should we care about where an idea comes from? No we shouldn’t.

In fact we should work hard to hide where (in terms of the person) ideas come from.

Only that has the possibility of driving group ownership, when an idea is put into practice.

I was in an interesting discussion with a well-respected captain of industry (we’ll call them Max) discussing the Peakbalance frame work. We had just spoken about the importance of enabling the HiPPO to contribute, but to anonymise their (HiPPO’s) input so as to allow an idea to survive on its merits.

As I was discussing the ‘deciding’ phase of the Peakbalance model, I blurted out that it was a waste of time focusing too much on the curation of ideas which Max took exception to.  

Max’s perspective was that it was through that personalised engagement that true ownership emerged. As Max seemed quite impassioned about their perspective, I didn’t think it was time to joust over what could be an innocuous point.

I did take that discussion away to develop a perspective on it, seeing as it seemed important to both of us.

So, lets consider the phases of ideation and execution.

-       Phase 1 – Review future state (where to we want to get to )

-       Phase 2- Consider current state (where we are)

-       Phase 3 – Brainstorm ideas to progress us from current state to future state

-       Phase 4 – Choose those few ideas that we’ll implement

-       Phase 5 – Execute those few ideas we chose in previous phase.

So in this simplistic strategy framework, phase 1 and 2 are the context of the situation. We’re then focusing on phases 3 to 5 around driving effectiveness.

Why do we typically praise people for coming up with ideas?

Because often people are too afraid to speak up or share their thoughts.

Why are they afraid? Well, because most ideas don’t survive in the face of better ideas.

We have to prioritise our limited time, talent and money. Therefore a bunch of good ideas don’t get implemented in favour of a few great ideas.

How to do something different and get people to jump on the bandwagon regularly then?

My hypothesis is that we anonymise where ideas come from, encourage ‘out there’ ideas that everyone is happy to shoot down, but that may take us to a break through.

How to prioritise ideas? Have a robust discussion around the pros / cons / opportunities / threats / risks etc with each idea. Then use Rapid Upvoting to choose.

At the moment of choosing, we now are focusing on those ideas that will take us forward. Also, because we’ve chosen an idea, we now collectively own it. Even that great idea will suffer from a changing world. Our competitors won’t just let us win market share! They’ll look for ways to stop us.

But when the world changes tack, that’s when the value of that group ownership will reveal itself and that’s where I think we need to focus.