How to Generate Your Best Ideas | Simon Sinek

You have to sometimes give directions, right? You're right. The early adopters will show up, but they don't always take the next step. And so you have to tell them, right? And they'll come up to you and be like, this is really good. You know, they're sort of like, they come up to you after the meeting, like, I think you're onto something. You know, they make themselves known very often, but there's two. There's two things to remember. One, they think they're the only one. So tell them that they're not. And when they're in the room with each other, be like, make offer to introduce them. Especially if you're in a big company, be like, you know who I need to introduce you to. Do me a favor, just go have lunch with this person. I know you guys will get along. You're just like each other. Go. And they will. And so what they start to do is realize they're not alone, and they start to create alliances across the organization. So that's really important, because risk tolerance goes down tremendously, or the tolerance goes up. I guess risk tolerance goes up tremendously when they realize they're not alone, friends. And then give them instructions. So I did this for a very large organization. I would say to them, I would say to them, hey, you know how you do sort of employee of the month? Why don't you change it to innovator of the month? And then instead of just choosing somebody who's good, choose somebody who's like, embodying the values. And I would give them suggestions of things they could do. And I would say, hey, do me a favor, you know, somebody else who gets it. Because that's the shorthand. Do me a favor, bring them to the next meeting. And so I would give instructions, I would offer ideas, and sometimes me giving them a few ideas, they would come up with their own. Or somebody else would come up to me and be like, I did this. I'm like, great idea. And I told everybody else about it. So I became sort of this hub. But before you know it, they start connecting without me, and they start going out for lunch without me and they start sharing ideas without me. And then it starts to go. But you do have to prime the pump. You do have to come up with ideas, or you do have to elicit ideas and take the best ones and share them. You do have to have idea generation sessions.

I can tell you one way in which we do it, which is phenomenal.

I don't believe so. One thing I never do When I do a brainstorming is I never say to people, I want to hear your best ideas. I want to hear all your ideas. I want to hear bad ideas. Because sometimes bad ideas are the seeds of great ideas. And I don't want people editing too early. Oh, he won't like that. How do you know? Right? So I say, give me ideas. I want bad ideas. I want every idea. But what I do is you have to give vision. You got to give people a vector, right? So what I'll do, and I've done this with my team a couple times, I'll say, okay, I want. Here's the vision, here's the vector. Here's what I'm trying to figure out, how to get to. Don't know how. That's where I need your help. I want every individual on this team to give me 15 ideas in the next 48 hours. And they all go, what? And I say, well, if I give you two weeks, you're going to do all the work in the last 48 hours anyway, so just leave out the middleman, right? I say, you can work in pairs if you want, but no bigger than that. Individuals or pairs are the only thing I'll accept. And I went, 15. And they go, why 15? And I go, because the first three or four ideas you have, I've already had those.

And that's exactly what happens. The 11, 12s and 13s are incredible, right? And then after 48 hours, we actually did this at an off site where we gave them an hour and a half, so they only had an hour and a half to go do it. And then they come back and the way we do the report out, then it's called Dogpile. We call it dogpile because literally we have a dog pile. Figuratively, we have a dogpile.

And do you ever play Boggle? Boggle? So Boggle rules are you have your list of words, and if somebody else says one of your words, you just cross it off. It just. It's not a thing. We said the same thing. I said we all, we let them report out two or three ideas each so we can. That everybody gets to talk. And we say, if somebody else says your idea, just cross it off your list. Don't give me like, oh, but I already said that. I don't care. It's not a. It's not a competition. I'm literally keeping no score and people will put out and there's no judgment. Nobody shoots anything down. I don't go, oh, by the way, I don't let Senior leaders participate.

They participate in the dog pile, not in the idea generation. And we don't shoot anything down. We don't go, oh, that's not viable. Oh, that's too expensive. Oh, we tried. We don't say anything. It's all just, let's hear it. And somebody put out an idea. And we'll go, yeah. And then somebody will go, what if we did that to it? And the ideas start to become amazing. At the end of the whole session, still no judgments. We organize all the ideas. Green, yellow, red, green is every idea we can execute very quickly with no money or very little money. Yellow is a little more time, little money, but still not that bad. Red is a lot of money, a lot of time. Still not qualitative. Then we look at all the greens and say, which are the ones we actually like? And we go execute. And what you will learn in this thing is some of your people are brilliant idea generators. They're machines, super creative. And there are some people who will say little to nothing. What I learned is that my best idea people are terrible executors, and my no idea people are brilliant executors. So everybody gets a job. Once you get to decisions on how you bring them to life.