For most of us, it’s easier to find what’s wrong with an idea than it is to find something good about it. On some levels, it’s the way our brains are wired. It’s also a quick way to show off our “expertise.” We all know experts who sit in meetings and shoot down every idea as if it were a clay pigeon. I call this the smartest-person-in-the-room syndrome. However, three powerful treasures await those who make the extra effort to first say what they like about an idea.
1. It shows respect for your colleagues and honors their thinking, making negative feedback easier to hear and increasing their respect for you.
2. It forces you to get out of your own mental framework and consider another perspective, which will forever expand your thinking.
3. It often leads to different and better ideas, as well as a culture that enables creativity and innovation.
I know the benefits of first finding what’s right about an idea from personal experience. As an advertising creative director, I always thought it was my job to come up with “the idea,” so it was easy to tell colleagues what was wrong with their ideas. Once I changed my feedback to what I liked about an idea before I killed it, I found it was usually easy to fix what I thought was wrong in the first place. My colleague’s fragile idea lived, it was improved, and often better than my idea.
Ultimately, without the smartest person in the room, the creative output of the team improved significantly.
Do you have any smartest person in the room war stories?
A Marketplace of Ideas 
Leave a Reply