Now that’s a good idea!

Sie haben eine gute Idee, sprechen darüber mit jemandem aus Ihrem Team und später präsentiert dieser Jemand genau diese Idee als die eigene. Das kommt vor, und deshalb ist es umso wichtiger, die Urheberschaft von Ideen zu respektieren und seine Ideen ents

Imagine that you are sitting in a meeting discussing a tough challenge that your team is facing. Suddenly, one of your colleagues, maybe the team leader, proposes an excellent idea to solve the problem. Everyone gasps in admiration, celebrates the idea enthusiastically and congratulates the person who proposed it.

So, where’s the problem? Well, it’s just that 24 hours earlier, you had suggested exactly the same idea in private to this same colleague (or leader) over your morning cup of coffee. But now, your idea has turned into their idea, and they are getting all the credit. That’s simply not right, is it?

This is an experience that many of us have at some point at work. And it is important to handle such situations well. After all, generating creative ideas is essential if teams are to perform well. Destructive conflicts can easily start when the ownership of ideas gets fuzzy — particularly when an individual feels their creative contributions are not recognized or, worse still, that their ideas have been stolen by others.

Common sense tells us that it’s only right to respect and reward the specific individuals who generate the good ideas. Credit, we believe, should be given where credit is due, and maintaining such ethics in a team is often seen as an essential part of leadership.

But is this simple and common-sense view really simple and really common sense? In fact, this perspective involves a number of problematic assumptions that, if left unchallenged, can undermine the ability of a team and of individuals to be truly creative.

The origins of ideas

Taking a step back, let’s ask ourselves whether “justified” annoyance is the only possible response in the above scenario. Not necessarily. At a very basic level, your colleague may simply have forgotten that you had the original idea. Forgetfulness happens to us all.

But there are much more interesting ways to think about this problem. After all, the moment we start talking about creative thinking, we enter the mysterious world of the human

mind — and come face to face with the mystery of creativity itself, a process we actually understand very little. In many ways, it’s miraculous. As we sit in our meetings reflecting on the problems that are being discussed, something causes us to think of something that we have never thought of before.

How does that happen? What is this causal chain of events that leads us to the “What if…?” moment? Do we actually cause creative thoughts to happen ourselves, or do they just somehow happen within us, driven by complex subconscious processes over which we have little direct access or control?

In a sense, we just get lucky when great ideas pop out from nowhere into our minds. So, are we overestimating our own role in producing our own thoughts? It’s nice to come up with creative proposals, but do we simply receive them as outputs of an unseen subconscious process?

Such questions about creativity have long been acknowledged by philosophers. And creative artists who keep a notepad by their bedside to capture ideas that come to them at the most unexpected moments during the night are testimony to the fact that the best ideas often just “happen” to us. We do not make them happen in the simplistic way that we often claim.

Ideas as process

At work, the reality is that the generation of ideas is mostly a collaborative process. Think about how proposals typically emerge. Someone comes up with a suggestion. A second person then disagrees. A third person proposes a different solution, and another disagrees. Then the first speaker picks up and runs with the third person’s idea, combining it with elements of their own. Finally, the one person who has been sitting and listening synthesizes it all and comes up with the killer suggestion. Eventually, everyone agrees on the right solution.

This is often the reality of idea generation. It’s a complex process of multiple influences, conscious and subconscious, people half-listening, often arguing, learning in the discussion what is possible and what is not. Then you finally come up with an idea that feels like it’s yours but is really a “cultural” product, the expression of a collective mindset. Your role is simply that of speaker, not of originator.

Communicating ideas

Ideas are not only generated in complex contexts at work, but are also often communicated in challenging and often highly charged organizational environments. This means that ideas and messages have to be owned in smart ways to ensure that they will survive and prosper.

At times, your idea may have a better chance of success if your manager presents it to the board as their idea rather than as yours. Also, you may increase your chance of clinching a sale if an advocate inside the customer’s organization uses your ideas as their own when persuading their own management to buy from you. And team members are more likely to commit to a personal development step if they believe that they came up with the idea after hours of skilful coaching than if you just tell them what to do.

The generation of ideas is a collaborative process

Allowing others to own ideas that they experience as selfgenerated — but which are, in reality, often insights moulded by skilful questioning — falls under various labels: coaching, customer-centric selling or just smart influencing. And allowing others to own your ideas as theirs is actually a key aspect of leadership. Holding on tightly to your own ideas may, indeed, disqualify you from your next role — at least in terms of mindset.

The final idea

We have journeyed from an initial experience of annoyance at others taking our ideas to a place where outcomes are understood as being more important than ownership. Of course, individuals should be recognized for their efforts. Misrepresentation is, at some level, theft. But our annoyance is seldom connected to these issues.

More often than not, our competitive desire to outshine others — and our need for validation from others — corrupts our thinking and behaviour. We end up focusing far too much on defending our own limited world view. Instead, we should be enabling the emergence of alternative perspectives and, in so doing, building a culture of shared leadership and aligned commitment.

Now, isn’t that a better idea to think about?