Ideas for the Masses: Purveyors of Mediocrity: Persecuting the Idea Monster
13. May, 2009 
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** This is a guest post by John P Vajda, PMP. Find out more about John at the bottom. **
Every great idea starts as the seed of one person or small group of people. The creative process used to come up with the next best thing, always starts small and innocent.
Why can’t we fly like birds?
Why can’t a horse and buggy have a motor?
Why can’t a machine calculate faster than the human brain?
Image by rsvstks.
As these seeds begin to bud and grow, the ideas become more visible to other people’s inputs, fears, desires, wishes and influence. Soon enough you’re once innocent plant of creativeness morphs into an angry apple tree from the Wizard of Oz. It is when these ideas turn into uncontrollable monsters that they are hunted down by the concerned misunderstanding towns-people and chased into some castle tower to be forever imprisoned from the world. Picture Frankenstein; a man’s quest to recreate life from death, turns drastically wrong.
Like lines of communications and the formula associated with determining how many lines of communication will exist in a project, a similar formula could be created for communicating an idea. As you add more people to a discussion of an idea, the more complex that idea will get, and the harder it will be to communicate and manage that idea. The idea soon morphs into something else, and with the wrong people involved in the discussion, your once great idea can become a bad one.
The core problem: Once an idea reaches the masses, the idea is dissected and reformed to fit the group’s needs. The more limited the group, the less an idea can grow and prosper.
So how does a project manager control the growth of ideas on a project? We all talk about collaboration in the 21st century over control, and we all agree in an Agile world, the group is critical to gather real-time feedback on a project. However, a PM must know who should be part of an ideas discussion and who should not be. Every organization has limited thinkers or the problem-based thinkers who only see issues or hurdles in regards to change. An idea represents change, and to some change is scary and threatening.
The bottom line: Someone who is scared of an idea will question it, devalue it, and try to steer it to mediocrity, whether they mean to or not.
As a PM you have to know who you purveyors of mediocrity are on your teams and in your stakeholder community. You have to know who you can bring into an ideas discussion and who you can’t. You want to help the idea grow into a beautiful flowering tree, not the angry apple tree from the Wizard of Oz. Should you hide things from your team? Of course not, but it is your responsibility to know “who” to include at “what” stage of the development of an idea.
The payoff: When you master the management of ideas as a PM, you may find your ideas flourishing and growing much faster then if you included the masses. Using this technique will hopefully lead to less persecution of “idea monsters” during the project lifecycle.
Previous guest post by John: “Life as an Agile Project: One big game of Risk: A Human’s Nature”
About the author: John P Vajda works as a Project Manager at Oracle Corporation*, and is becoming more Agile everyday.
* The statements in this blog do not reflect that of Oracle Corporation, and are solely those opinions and thoughts of John P Vajda.
I agree to a point – the point at which the idea, which has never been exposed to a realistic view on it, becomes so “pie in the sky” and rose covered that it divorces itself from reality.
Every idea session, every brainstorming, should also include a bucket thrower. A bucket thrower is a person who is able to throw water on the fire of an idea to cool down the hot air and high ideas. A bucket thrower is the one who brings reality to the discussion.
For example, I was on a project that was about a warehouse system – a nice simple track items, receive items, give items out. Before you know it, the solution was SOA out the wazzoo, running 10 services in the background (on a laptop), running a full oracle installation (on the same laptop!), including a full workflow engine on the UI, and sending MBs of data for every single “get item” call. That idea needed a big old bucket of “IT’S JUST AN INVENTORY SYSTEM” on it.
Now, of course, being a good bucket thrower is an art to itself – not being annoying, but reining in the people who go too far afield; being about to critize, but not being abrasive; and being able to know when to shut up to let some ideas that are marginal live (or fail) on their merits.
Josh -
I disagree with you. Not every session needs a bucket thrower – or, in other words – a killjoy. If you’re innovating and creating, you, as the PM, have to understand that those Idea Generators need a few sessions together to come up with ideas. Then, when it’s deemed relevant, everyone pulls together to discuss the relevancy, possibility and probability of the idea(s). To kill an idea before it’s taken flight (or at least been designed with wings) is doing a complete disservice to your project and, let’s face it, the act (and art) of innovating.
I kind of agree with Josh. I have been a part of groups where we referred to our bucket thrower as our conscience. He was pretty abrasive, but that became a gate unto itself. If you believed enough in your idea to get it past that gate of conscientious skepticism, then it definitely deserved to see some daylight.
Depends on the topic being discussed. For really out of the box thinking, remove the nay-sayers. And do some scrubbing in a second session.
If you need some action plan within an hour, you need the bucket guy.
Though efficient, I believe that it is more important for a PM to fully understand why the idea creating the change is scary to every stakeholder. By limiting participation in the project, you could inherently be adding risk to your project. It is often the people who are the most scared and resistant who hold the key to the project’s success. It does take more time at the beginning of a project to collect data and expose your idea to enough people to ensure that it is honed into the best executable concept. You need to “go slow to go fast” in order to ensure that the quality of the group’s thinking is the best it can be. I agree with the author’s point about how to winnow participation down in order to get buy-in and to gain speed. The real art of managing stakeholders from a PM perspective is to apply that technique to the right decision and right content at the right time. Remember, idea conceptualization and closing a project’s issue is very different. One is more undefined and has a larger scope and one is usually targeted and more transactional. It is important to bring more people in at the beginning of the idea conceptualization. As you know, closing an issue can utilize a specific group of SME’s to provide a solution.
Hi Terri, thanks for your additions. I love the phrase “go slow to go fast” Good stuff.
Great topic and post. This post, and some of the above comments, makes me think of Belbin Roles — Who are the “Plants” on the team and how are they cultivated? That and DeBono’s Six Thinking Hats — Are all hats represented and respected? Even the Green Hat?
An important contributing factor in this “persecution” of “idea monsters” might be Hollander’s Theory of Idiosyncratic Credits. Introducing new ideas threatens group norms, so the effective “idea guy” needs to be aware of his credit “balance” with the group and spend wisely.
I am just such an idea guy one month into a new job on a technical team. From my observations of what’s going on, I have some ideas about communication, knowledge management, and standards that I find important to the project goals. I have been testing the waters for those ideas, but have had very little time to grow enough credits to really get them out there. I have to balance my sense of urgency with patience and find the kinds of quotidian credit-earning norm-complying I can do for the team to get to a level of trust where I can make suggestions.
We idea people seem to be always on the group fringe in certain respects, spanning boundaries, horizon watching, etc. So to be effective, we need to watch out for the team’s perception of our own compliance and support.