How To Kill Ideas With Two Words

You’ve probably said it yourself recently. Yes, but.. 

Something has promise but there are a few issues to sort out. There are problems.

Every workplace is under pressure to change. Whether it’s technology, financial pressures, shifting demographics or a host of other factors the imperative to change is always there.

In even the smallest of ways, we are confronted with change and our ability to handle it. A new computer software programme or phone is foisted upon us and before we know it there’s just that little more to learn.

In many ways we have been well trained for change.We go to the bank and they want us to do for ourselves what we’ve always relied on a teller to do.

We check ourselves in at the airport and have to select and self serve our way through call centre menus that once had a real person at the other end of the line.

As irritated as we can be at times, we adapt to this new world and find ourselves learning the new ways with relative ease. While some of us find online banking too hard to navigate, many of us do it with ease and would never want to go back to the old days again.

And yet in our workplaces, we often find the response to change very different. How often have you been at a meeting where a new idea is suggested and then immediately someone says ‘Yes, but we tried that five years ago.’

If you hear a lot of ‘Yes, but..’ in your workplace you can be sure you’re going nowhere fast. There’s no better way of killing an idea than by instantly responding to it in the negative. It’s a curious yet common response and a good measure of how interested your workplace really is in change.

A simple way of understanding this phenomenon is to invert it and constantly greet new ideas with the response ‘Yes, and..’. Instead of reacting to each new idea by trying to find ways in which it wont work, respond by finding ways in which it will work.

It’s a pretty simple idea and yet most of the time we don’t do it. There’s something about negativity that’s addictive and groups of people tend to be drawn to those who sagely dissect new ideas by leaving their proposers embarrassed and shamed.

You’ll know your in the presence of an Olympic standard idea blocker when you hear the words ‘I’m just being the Devil’s Advocate here’. I’m often tempted to ask these people, ‘and who appointed you?’.

For no doubt many reasons, negativity has a strong gravitational pull in group settings. There’s an assumption that the ‘Devil’s Advocate’ is applying a higher level of intelligence to the issue at hand that the proposers of new ideas are naïve, reckless or too simple to understand the complexity of whatever is under consideration.

What’s really happening in this situation is the preservation of the status quo. Whether conscious or otherwise, resistance to even considering new ideas is the surest way to keeping things as they are.

Sometimes keeping things as they are is unquestionably the best option. Founding principles, teachings and authority are constants that anchor and guide organisations and are importantly and necessarily unchanging.

But most new ideas in organisations do not offend or impinge upon these essential foundational principles – they’re disruptive effective is more often than not personal in that they challenge individuals to change where their preference is to remain the same regardless of what could be best for the organisation.

If the first line response to new ideas in your organisations is negative, you’ll eventually eradicate them entirely. Always defaulting to the status quo not only kills ideas, it drives those with them out of organisations.

There’s nothing more dispiriting than to see opportunities for growth and flourishing and yet have no way of floating them, let alone trying them out or making them happen.

Workplaces can be filled with people who have great ideas but who have nowhere to express them. A false consensus develops where the idea killing culture prevails and where it’s easier to go with the flow than to challenge the negativity.

In practical terms, countless good ideas, innovations and cost savings are lost because organisations have convinced themselves that the biggest risk is to even consider change.

In a less dynamic time this may have worked and yet as organisations are confronted with challenges on almost every front, the choice is not whether we change but whether or not we do so on our own terms.

The ‘yes but’ culture is the surest way to creating inertia in your organisation and in the times we find ourselves in, the last words we need to hear.

Tony Farley is the Executive Director of the Catholic Commission for Employment Relations