Simon Sinek asks teams to generate 15 ideas in 48 hours, including bad ones, to ease pressure. The best ideas often come around number 11 or 13, not first. He notes that creative thinkers rarely execute well, so teams should measure success on what they actually build together, not idea count.
Chapters
I don't believe in telling people, "Give me your best ideas." That's too much pressure. I want all your ideas. I want your worst ideas, because sometimes bad ideas have a kernel of something, right? So I always ask people, "Give me your worst ideas. Just give me ideas." So I take all the pressure off. And I went to the team, the whole team, and I said, "Okay, here's the vision. Here's what I'm trying to do. I don't know how to do it. And so I need, I want from every single person on this team 15 ideas." on how to achieve what I want to achieve in the next 48 hours. And they all complained about the 48 hours. And I said, if I gave you 2 weeks, you're going to make your lists in the last 2 days. So let's just cut out the middleman. Let's just cut out the middleman. They asked if they could work in teams. I said, you can work in twos and threes, but nothing bigger than that. Yes, that's fine. I'm fine with that. Again, some people like cooperation, present company included. And then 48 hours later, we had a big meeting to have everybody present. And this is what I said. I said, this is about contribution, not competition. I'm not keeping score. I don't care if somebody has 10 ideas and somebody else has zero. I don't care. I said, we're going to do Boggle rules. Do you ever play the game Boggle? You know, and like if somebody says your word, you just cross it off your list. It doesn't count. I said, if somebody says your idea, just cross it off your list. I don't need to hear, well, I had the same idea as Pete. Like, it's OK. It's fine. I don't care. "Right, just cross it off the list. It doesn't exist. It's fine." And I only took 2 or 3 ideas at a time so that everybody would get to share something, right? Here's what I discovered. I had some remarkable idea people. Oh, and by the way, they asked me why 15 ideas. It's because I've already had the first 4. Like, whatever their top 4 ideas are, I've already had those ideas. So I don't need them. The ideas got really good at 11, 12, 13. And what ended up happening, like I said, they weren't all great ideas. They were ideas. And somebody would hear one of them and be like, "Ooh, what if we did that?" And they ended up becoming great ideas that nobody could claim credit for because we did it together, right? But here's what I discovered from a team standpoint that was hugely powerful for me. I had some people who their creativity was spectacular. They had 5, 6, 7, 8 ideas if I was keeping score. And some people, Zeros, like legit zeros, or the ideas were just so, just useless, right? Like zeros. But my best idea people were my worst executors.
Yeah.
And my worst idea people were my best executors. And I realized I've got a great team. And so I can't call it a meritocracy if I kept score on who had the great ideas. It's only a meritocracy if the team is able to execute on its own ideas. It's the team's ideas, not a person's ideas. Yeah. Because what did Thomas Edison say? Vision without execution is hallucination.
