Not Every Idea Needs Buy-In

So I'm gonna be honest, I proposed this topic entirely as very selfish self-help, so I'm gonna throw it all out there, which is exactly my problem.

I have a lot of ideas, and my brain tends to think very quickly two or three things ahead, but that often means that I love to think on my feet and share ideas of things I would like to do and ways I would like to put the world to right with my colleagues at work way, way before my ideas are really ready for scrutiny and fit to be able to get buy-in.

And often I'm not ready for the either lack of interest, or people just not getting what I'm saying, or they get what I'm saying and they start asking really good probing questions, which is exactly what I encourage them to do, and I, I have no answers because I haven't spent time validating my i- idea.

I haven't spent time.

Sometimes it's the first time I've ever said it out loud, and I've never written it down.

In fact, quite often.

So yeah, I make this mistake, and what I tend to find is that means that sometimes I put myself on the hook for things that are ill-defined, and then people expect things of me, and that's a shame.

Uh, but more often than not, it's just...

it ends up as noise, because it's lots of stuff I'm saying that doesn't happen, and I really want to improve my signal-to-noise ratio and give out fewer ideas into the world, but get better buy-in for the ones I put out there and be more successful.

So I'd love to hear either story time about buy-in that did or didn't go well or tips on how I can do better.

I can start you off a little bit there, because I think you need to probably reframe your expectations, is what I would start with, because socializing ideas is one of the best ways to get buy-in.

So throwing out ideas is not a bad thing, but expecting everything you throw out to turn into something is probably a false expectation.

By socializing them, you can find out a little bit more about what works for other people, because you- If you can find out if there's a reason for it, if there's a benefit to the other person you're speaking to, to the team, if it's a team meeting, you can then frame it better and actually drive the ideas that you think will have impact.

So it is not a bad idea to throw lots of ideas out, but it's a probably a bad idea to have, um, an expectation that all your thousands of ideas are gonna actually turn into something realistic or expectation.

What you need to do is make sure that, as you say, there's a signal to noise ratio there.

There's a balancing point.

You're right.

You can saturate people too much that they just think all your ideas are crazy.

You need to make sure that some of those ideas do stick, do add value, that do persist.

But it doesn't have to be a high percentage, it just has to be a percentage.

'Cause you can give other people ideas that then trigger ideas, and that's not a negative, if you see what I mean.

The amount of times I've thrown ideas out that someone else has then gone, "Ah, no, that won't work, but..." And that value of that conversation can be quite powerful, because you've all got different experiences, different knowledge.

So by socializing ideas, it's one of the best ways to get buy-in, 'cause you can see what's sticky.

And you see if you need to change the way you frame it.

The classic one is we're often a tester in a team of developers, um, or low ratio of testers to developers, and therefore the thing that we think is most important, we probably have to frame in a way that people writing code or writing software application see as important.