Some Ideas Stink

I spend a lot of my time in brainstorming sessions -- drumming up new design ideas, thinking through next steps for our organization, leading teams to improve our systems, and the list goes on and on.  It takes a ton of conversation around one idea to come up with anything actionable and worthy of pursuit.  To get one decent idea, we burn through a thousand ideas that stink.

There are a few guidelines that we developed (or stole from somebody...I can't remember who) to help us stay on track during brainstorms.  I figured I'd share two of them with you today:

1. People are awesome, but some ideas are stupid.  Therefore, we criticize ideas, not people.

2. Stupid ideas lead to brilliant ideas, so share your stupid ideas freely!

You might look at the progress of our organization and marvel at how innovative we are, or how creative we appear to be...  But if you got to hang out with us behind closed doors and hear all of the inane conversations we have, and listen to all of the idiotic ideas that we throw out, you would wonder how on earth we have been as successful as we are.  In fact, I'm pretty sure that if you spent one workday with me you would be searching for someone else to shadow the next day, because you would've exhausted all of my ingenius potential in that 8-hour period.

Yes, it's true.  I am not all that creative, and I am not very innovative.  But in some strange way I think that's what makes me remotely good at what I do.  I know good ideas when I hear them, and I recognize ideas that stink.

Luckily for me I am surrounded by people who offer their stupid ideas as freely as I do mine; and they are gracious enough to endure such a process.

You might think that's silly.  We call it progress.

Giving Leadership Away

I love leading.  For most of my life, it's been more of an addiction than a vocation.  Only in the last few years have I begun to understand all that is involved in calling yourself a leader.

As the oldest of four children, I was always called upon to lead.  "Benjamin, you need to set the example for everybody else to follow."  I don't ever remember hearing my parents pull the "why can't you act more like Benjamin?" card on my siblings.  That's probably because I wasn't really worth emulating.  I can, however, remember plenty of occasions when my example got all four of us in trouble...and thus began my lessons in leadership.

I'm an introvert.  For the first two years of my life my mother worried that I'd never crack a smile.  She tried day in and day out to get me to show some sort of emotion (or so I'm told).  And then the day came when I did, and since then she hasn't been able to get me to be serious.  You may look at me now and think I'm extroverted, but I promise you it's all a show.  I learned early on how to turn on the "ham" and entertain people.  This wasn't helped as my parents purchased a home video recorder (you know...the original, massive, shoulder-resting, VHS recording JVC units that we all used to have).  We recorded every holiday, every road trip, every birthday, and every now and then we busted it out to record a home video update to mail to the G-parents.  Yes sir, I learned how to act at a young age!

And somehow over the years that act became synonymous with leading.  Leadership became equated with being the goofiest, loudest, and most entertaining personality in the room; and I loved it.

Then the day finally came when I learned how to play guitar.  Suddenly I had a reason to be on stages, in front of dozens (if not hundreds) of people at a time, "leading."  It was in those years (my late teens and early 20's) that my addiction to being in front of people really took root and began to grow.

Before I knew it, I was speaking into all kinds of projects and situations, "leading" entire groups of people to accomplish tasks together, but something was missing.  I didn't feel as though I was getting any better at moving people towards increased productivity.  I didn't feel like the people under my leadership were being pushed to become more than they were before.  I didn't feel like our organization was pushing the envelope in creativity and innovation.  We were not experiencing momentum; we were not growing.  And I began to realize that I wasn't creating leaders who could create leaders; I was merely training drones to replicate tasks.  Our success was limited by me and my ideas about how things should be done.

Real leaders don't only delegate responsibility; they delegate authority.

Today I had a lunch meeting with someone who is joining our production team.

We met to discuss her role on the team, and the scope of what I'm asking her to do.  You see, she's a volunteer.  In fact, almost our entire organization is run by volunteers.  That's because we made a strategic decision to give leadership away.

Instead of holding onto the reins of control, we've decided to place control in the hands of volunteers.  I guess we could just recruit volunteers, train them to do exactly what we want them to do, and then watch over their shoulders as they regurgitate the tasks that we imparted; but who wants to be a part of that system, anyway?  Or worse, we could waste gobs of money by just hiring staffers and giving them jobs to accomplish each week.

But because I sat across the table over lunch, and gave my leadership away, my hour-long lunch break wasn't wasted on the minutiae of training another volunteer; rather, I invested that hour into an up-and-coming leader.  I gave her my leadership.

One day she'll be better at doing my job than I am...not because I trained her how to be better than me, but because she has the potential to be better than me.  All I did was stir it up in her.

You know, sometimes being the most boisterous person in the room will get you a lot of attention, but it will never give you the courage to give your leadership away.

Maybe, instead of the show, you could try slipping into the background, where you might actually find a leader-in-the-making who could use a little nudge.  And a nice gift.