Bubble your ideas up
Do you ever struggle to bring your ideas to life? I certainly do. Sometimes, I’m missing an essential part to get things moving. Over time, I realized the best way to remove that creative lockdown is to share my ideas with others.
Sharing unpolished ideas and thoughts sounds scary and it actually is! We put ourselves out there, being exposed to the judgment of others. And more often than not, others judge. When we share things online, we amplify that exposure.
Don’t despair, both the exposure and embracing vulnerability whilst sharing is worth doing. It’s hard to come up with all the answers alone. We typically have a crucial part of the puzzle and we are missing others. It takes time and the input of other individuals for big ideas to incubate. One of my favorite RSA Animate chapters is where good ideas come from. Through a short video, it explains this same concept and uses the invention of the World Wide Web as an example. Tim Berners-Lee worked on it for 10 years and the final vision and concept was influenced by many projects he worked on collaborating with others.
Catering for an inclusive environment makes it easier for people to present their ideas the way they feel most comfortable. There are structured ideation techniques that we can use to gather and curate ideas so all voices are heard. I recently found this comprehensive ideation techniques list from the Interaction Design Foundation. I utilize writing, dot voting and anonymous forms in group settings as a way to be more inclusive in ideation and decision making processes.
There’s also another way to positively influence psychological safety both online and in person and promote an environment of knowledge sharing. The way we react to the views of another person when they are different to our own has a lot to do with them feeling safe sharing with us another time. When we don’t agree with someone we can adopt a position of confrontation which may lead to conflict. That’s perceived and absorbed by our counterpart and any other person participating of the exchange. It may create a pattern that is replicated in future interactions causing a ripple effect. The Gottman Institute has completed extensive research on how to transform criticism into connection. They recommend speaking with awareness, being tolerant of your partner’s perspective and transforming criticism into wishes as ways to have richer conversations. In “The Opposable Mind” by Roger Martin, integrative thinking is presented as a way to hold conflicting ideas in a constructive tension to come up with even superior ideas.
What’s the last idea you shared?