A good idea stuck inside a bad idea

The image at the start of this article is Stringer Bell, a crime boss in The Wire, chairing a meeting with his subordinate drug distributors. I say "chairing" because, on this occasion, he is making them follow formal rules of parliamentary procedure. This is part of his effort to improve the efficiency and profitability of the organisation, but culminates in Bell yelling at his "secretary" for taking minutes -- "Is you taking notes on a criminal f----- conspiracy? F--- is you thinkin’ man?" Indeed.

This is clearly absurd, yet we see this kind of thing all the time in organisations, both in the public and private sectors. It has nothing to do with the individual expertise or goodwill of the people involved. It has everything to do with a lack of scrutiny and a lack of frameworks for evaluation.

What we see here is a good idea: find innovative ways to apply insights from one field into another, to achieve new levels of efficiency and profitability. But the good idea is stuck inside a series of bad ideas. The only way to rescue those good ideas is to systematically strip away the bad ideas. Yet a lot of organisations fail to do this.

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What happens when you put up an idea in your organisation? It either gets up or it doesn't. If it gets up, ideally it will be developed further before being implemented, but sometimes an idea will go straight through in its original form. More often, the idea doesn't get up, and what happens next in this situation is very important.

If a rejected idea hangs around, that's very bad. The person will put it up again and again, because they still think it is a good idea that deserves to fly. In the absence of proper frameworks for evaluation, nobody can give them a proper answer about why their idea is no good, they just don't like it.

In the public service and elsewhere, there are people who have been putting up the same idea every year for over a decade. They're not working on improving the idea, they're just looking for someone who is "not stupid" who will support their idea as-is.

Now you might think that a rejected idea, that hangs around as someone's pet project, is not a big deal -- at worst a minor annoyance. But what happens if one day it gets up? Surprisingly, this does happen. When there is a major change or crisis, there is a sudden need for different kinds of ideas. While your idea is still a bad idea, it is closer to what we seem to need than anything else we have on hand. So it gets up. Now we're in big trouble.

What should be happening is that bad (or rejected) ideas get evaluated against some objective framework. Of course every framework has some element of subjectivity in it, but what matters is that the framework points towards the things that are valuable to the particular organisation and its chosen strategy. Ideas should not be rejected because someone doesn't like the sound of them or doesn't understand them, they should be rejected because they are not considered valuable against the organisation's chosen standards.

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Then, the outer layer needs to be stripped off the idea, to try to find the gold nuggets hidden within. Because if a person thought this idea was good, and felt strongly about it, they're probably not completely wrong. The idea needs to be mined for what is worthwhile and valuable. Anything less is just leaving money on the table. You can waste good people by ignoring their bad ideas.

After all, the only difference between a person with good ideas and a person with bad ideas is that the person with good ideas has gotten rid of all their bad ideas.

The only difference between a person with good ideas and a person with bad ideas is that the person with good ideas has gotten rid of all their bad ideas.

What is happening instead is that bad ideas are festering. People are getting frustrated that they're not being listened to, and that senior decision-makers are making what they see as consistently poor decisions. Then, one day, these old ideas are "vindicated" as the solution to some urgent problem. They're not improved at all, of course. They're still the same old bad ideas. But they are implemented with an enthusiasm that is way out of proportion to their likely benefits.

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When applied to an idea that turns out to be harmful, the harm is amplified. The pent-up frustration becomes the driving force of the initiative, not the pursuit of excellence or anything to do with the organisation's strategy. And since the organisation lacks proper processes for scrutiny and evaluation -- which is how it got into this mess in the first place -- there is nothing to control this new, harmful force. There are many patterns under which good people do bad things, and this is one of them.

If an organisation treats its bad ideas with respect, and properly scrutinises them to extract good ideas, then it will be better placed to react to a crisis or major change. When the crisis comes, the organisation won't be turning to "that thing Brett has been banging on about for five years". They'll be turning to a good idea they extracted, as a team, out of Brett's original (half-baked) idea.

Innovation is a good thing. Innovation that is unhinged from the organisation's structures and strategies, on the other hand, is not innovation at all. It is just noise. And it can do a lot of harm.

Every organisation must ensure it has a clear strategy, values, and processes for scrutinising ideas. Anything less leaves it vulnerable to bad ideas, at the times it can least afford them.