I’ve been thinking this week about something we often say:
“We need more ideas.”
I’m becoming less convinced that organisations necessarily do.
People have ideas all the time.
They notice inefficient processes.
They see customer problems.
They recognise opportunities.
They know when something isn’t working.
They occasionally see possibilities long before the organisation does.
The real question may be what happens to those ideas next.
Imagine someone notices a better way of doing something.
They could mention it.
But perhaps the last person who challenged the accepted way was dismissed as difficult.
Perhaps their manager is under pressure and doesn’t welcome questions.
Perhaps previous suggestions disappeared into a system and were never heard of again.
Perhaps a failed experiment damaged someone’s reputation.
Perhaps nothing dramatic happens at all.
People simply learn.
And eventually they make a perfectly rational choice:
Keep quiet.
From the organisation’s perspective, nothing happened.
No proposal was rejected.
No innovation programme failed.
No employee complained.
There is nothing obvious to measure.
Yet something valuable may have been lost.
An idea was never expressed.
That’s what makes Human Agency so interesting to me.
People are continually making choices about whether to speak, challenge, experiment, question, contribute and take responsibility.
And those choices don’t happen independently of the organisation around them.
The environment matters.
Leadership matters.
Previous experience matters.
The way mistakes are treated matters.
The response to disagreement matters.
All of these things influence whether exercising Human Agency feels worthwhile.
This doesn’t mean every idea should be accepted.
Far from it.
Strong Human Agency also means being able to hear:
“No, and here’s why.”
An organisation needs judgement as much as it needs ideas.
But there is an enormous difference between an idea being considered and rejected…
…and an idea never being offered because someone has already learned what happens to people who speak.
Perhaps that’s why creating innovative organisations requires more than encouraging creativity.
We need to understand the conditions in which people decide to use it.
Because the greatest barrier to innovation may not be a shortage of ideas.
It may be the environment those ideas have to survive in.
So perhaps a useful question for any leadership team is:
How many good ideas never reach us because somewhere in this organisation someone has already decided it isn’t worth speaking?
Related Articles:
Why Human Agency Helps Some Teams Consistently Outperform Others
Human Agency and Innovation: Why the Best Ideas Are Sometimes Never Spoken