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?
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.
