If You Want People's Best Ideas, Stop Bullying Them Into Thinking.

Being the quiet one worked, mostly.

I’ve always been shy. In meetings, I’m the one that stays quiet. I prefer to listen and gather facts before speaking up. I’ve been told that’s weak. For a long time, I believed it. Now I realize it’s the people that offer opinions without context that are weak. Listening is my super-power. If this sounds familiar, don’t be bullied into speaking up. You’re the smart one.

“Are you really not going to talk?”

A CEO once told me, “Don’t you have anything to offer?” He had just called an impromptu meeting to share some big ideas he had come up with the night before. Everyone had to drop what they had planned for the morning, and show up. He wanted feedback and an action plan to make his big idea a reality. I was one of the VPs in the room. A couple of the others lobbed some softball questions at him. Most people said nothing, but nodded. I was quiet.

After the meeting, he asked why I didn’t have anything to say. I told him it was a lot to absorb. I was thinking, reflecting - and that I’d come back with additional questions and insights later. He didn’t like that. “As a leader in this organization, I need you to be more vocal when I present ideas. When you don’t speak, it’s says you don’t care.”

Let’s be clear. This CEO was a dick. And not because he wanted me to speak when I didn’t have anything to say. He was a bully, and everyone in that room knew it. He didn’t want questions, not real ones anyway. He certainly didn’t want pushback. He wanted validation. He wanted everyone to say how brilliant his idea was, and commit to making it happen. Everyone had serious reservations, but rather than put their jobs at risk and say what they wanted to say, they stayed quiet. I don’t blame them.

This is an extreme example, but I know you can relate. Everyone has stories like this. The idea that people can be presented with a novel idea and come up with insightful, valuable questions on the spot simply does not reflect how the human brain works. If you want people’s first reaction, their gut feel, that’s fine. People can do that. It’s an emotional response. But if you want something more thoughtful, people need time to digest and reflect on new ideas. And if you expect people to agree to a big idea right off the bat, and commit to executing it before thinking it through, you might scare people into nodding along. But you’ll never get the buy-in you need to make it work.

This CEO could have done that. He could have shared his idea and allowed people to digest it. He could have held another meeting in a day or two to have a conversation about it. We’d have been able to ask questions, get more context, even challenge it to make sure we understood. But that’s not what he wanted. He wasn’t changing his idea. It wasn’t up for debate, not really. Which is why to him, there was no point in giving people more time to think about it.

How people really come up with good ideas

This isn’t about a shitty CEO, even though it feels good to write about it. It underscores a long-held misconception about how people think. Contrary to what we’ve always been told, humans do not come up with their best ideas on the spot, or around other people. How many times have you been involved in a group brainstorming session after being presented with a new question or idea? Yes, that describes now 99% of us have done brainstorming. But this is not where our best ideas come from. Our best ideas come when we’re not trying so hard. They come in the shower, driving or on a walk.

Our subconscious needs time to breathe. This is the creative part of our mind that we need to access to come up with out-of-the box solutions. This creativity is why we have such crazy, interesting, lucid dreams. It’s where ideas come from.

How many times have you sat at your computer trying to solve a problem for hours, then gone for a walk and the answer finally hits you? Most people spend their days in meetings, in front of a computer and on camera - there is no time to think. We settle for the first answer that pops into our heads, because that’s all we have time for. If we want our best ideas, and those of the people we work with, we need to schedule time to think about nothing at all.

Schedule time to be bored

We’re never bored anymore. We’ve engineered it out of our lives. We’ve filled every crevice of our day with meetings, podcasts, music and apps. I used to sit on a city bus for 40 minutes to get to school. I’d stare at the same 3 ads the whole ride. I’d watch condensation drip down the windows. I’d create stories in my head about the people sitting around me. It sounds like torture, that kind of boredom. But we didn’t call it boredom. We called it life.

Now, I’m trying to get boredom back. I’m scheduling it, to give my mind space to think. That means no podcasts or music on my runs. It means driving to the cottage for 3 hours with no radio, with nothing but the sound of rubber on road to keep me company. I admit, it takes some getting used to. But it’s meditative. And I have come up with ideas I’m convinced I’d never have come up with otherwise - including the idea for this post.

If you want people to tell you how smart you are, go ahead and ask them about your big idea on the spot. You’ll probably get the validation you’re looking for. But good people have good ideas. If you don’t give them space to explore them, they’ll find someone that will. They deserve better. So do you.