Trish's Blog

Think about the last time an idea fell flat in a meeting. Maybe it felt half-formed, or too far from the current direction, or just not quite right for where the team was trying to get to. The conversation moved on. The idea was set aside. And the meeting continued toward something more workable.

Now think about what might have been sitting inside that idea that nobody stayed long enough to find out.

Most leadership teams have developed a highly efficient filtering system. It runs automatically, shaped by the pressures of moving fast, staying aligned, and not wasting time on thinking that doesn’t immediately hold up. In that environment, ideas that don’t fit cleanly get filtered out early. It feels like good judgment. It often is. But it comes with a cost that is easy to miss, because what gets lost doesn’t announce itself on the way out.

Why the Filter Is Set Too Early

The instinct to move quickly past ideas that don’t immediately fit is understandable. Your time is limited. Your team’s attention is a resource. And there is real pressure, often unspoken but consistently present, to keep things moving toward decisions rather than opening up new lines of thinking that might slow everything down.

But that filter, set too early and applied too consistently, doesn’t just remove the weak ideas. It removes the unexpected ones. And those are rarely the same thing.

An idea that doesn’t immediately fit the current direction might be weak. It might also be surfacing something important that the current direction hasn’t accounted for. An idea that challenges how things have always been done might be impractical. It might also be exposing an assumption that has been shaping your decisions without anyone having explicitly chosen it. An idea that feels awkward in the room might simply be unfinished. It might also be the beginning of a line of thinking that leads somewhere more useful than anything that was already on the table.

The problem is that you cannot tell which of these is true if you evaluate before you explore. And most teams evaluate first, almost by default.

What a So-Called Bad Idea Is Often Doing

You have probably seen this, even if you didn’t quite name it at the time. Someone says something that doesn’t quite fit, and the room changes. Not because the idea itself was the answer, but because something in it moved the conversation. A better question emerged. A gap became visible that nobody had been looking at directly. The thinking deepened in a direction it wasn’t heading before.

That is not an accident. It is what happens when an unfinished idea is allowed to stay in the room long enough to do something. The idea itself may never go anywhere. But the thinking it unlocks often does.

This is one of the most underappreciated dynamics in team conversations: the value of an idea is not always contained in the idea itself. Sometimes its value is in what it surfaces. The assumption it makes visible. The boundary it exposes. The question it prompts that nobody had thought to ask. When you filter ideas out before they have had a chance to do that work, you don’t just lose the idea. You lose everything that might have followed from it.

Where Weird Wisdom® and Diversity of Thought Come Together

This is where Weird Wisdom® at Work and Diversity of Thought stop being separate concepts and start working together in practice. And it is worth being direct about why this matters for you as a leader.

When you build a team that genuinely draws on different ways of thinking, with varied backgrounds, experiences, and styles, the ideas that surface will not always be neat. They will not always arrive fully formed or fit comfortably within the existing direction. That is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is a sign that diversity of thought is present and doing what it is supposed to do.

Genuinely different thinking does not produce ideas that look like slightly improved versions of the ideas you were already having. It produces ideas that can feel awkward, premature, or misaligned with where the conversation currently is. And if your team’s response to that is to filter those ideas out quickly, you are not getting the benefit of the diversity you have built. You are getting its surface appearance while its value goes unused.

Weird Wisdom® at Work asks something specific of you in those moments. Not to accept every idea uncritically. Not to slow every conversation to a halt in the name of exploration. But to develop the habit of exploring before evaluating, staying with an idea long enough to ask what it might be surfacing, before deciding whether it has value. That is a different instinct from the one most teams have developed. And building it deliberately changes what your team is capable of finding.

What Exploring Before Evaluating Actually Looks Like

This does not require a dramatic change in how your meetings run. It requires a change in the moment that follows when an idea falls flat in the room.

Instead of moving past it, you pause. You ask what the idea is responding to. What problem is it trying to solve, even if the solution itself isn’t quite right? What assumption is it pushing against? What would have to be true for this to be pointing at something real?

Those questions do not take long. But they change the dynamic of the conversation significantly. They signal to your team that the value of a contribution is not determined solely by whether the idea arrived fully formed. They create the conditions for the person who has the unconventional thought to believe it is worth voicing, even when they know it isn’t ready. And over time, they build the kind of team culture where the thinking that moves things forward has a chance of making it into the room.

Progress Starts Before the Idea Is Ready

The ideas that lead somewhere rarely begin as finished things. They begin as something unfinished that someone was willing to say out loud, and a team that was willing to stay with it long enough to see what it could become.

That willingness is not automatic. It runs against the pressure to move fast, decide quickly, and filter ruthlessly for what immediately holds up. But the teams that consistently find their way to better outcomes are the ones where you have built a different norm: that an idea doesn’t need to be right to be useful, and that the thinking which follows from an unexpected contribution is often more valuable than the contribution itself.

Your team is not short of ideas. It may be short of the conditions that allow the most important ones to surface and stay in the room long enough to do something. That is something you can change. It starts with what you do the next time an idea falls flat and you feel the pull to move on.

Stay with it a little longer. Ask what it might be telling you. Because the thinking your team hasn’t been able to access yet is often sitting just on the other side of the idea you were about to dismiss.