Our ideas get lost. What can we do?

We try to be innovative but our ideas get lost in emails and ad-hoc conversations, what can we do?

It’s funny how it’s the little things that derail the big opportunities.

A CEO was telling me how he found it very disappointing that his people rarely came up with any ideas for the business. He wasn’t lamenting the lack of good ideas; he was talking about the lack of any ideas.

A few days later I was talking with some of his team and, completely unprompted, they told me how frustrated they were because they had generated masses of ideas for the business but none of them ever seemed to go anywhere.

I could have been talking to two completely different businesses!

As I dug a little deeper the team started making a few comments like:

“I never know what to do with an idea, I don’t know who to tell it to.”

“The CEO says he wants ideas but mine don’t feel important enough to bring up with him.”

“I took an idea to the CEO but clearly it wasn’t the ‘right time’ as he gave me the ‘what-the?’ look.”

“I’ve taken lots of ideas to the CEO, GM and CFO and never heard anything again.”

If you have ever worked in a less-than senior role in a business this will probably sound familiar – certainly I remember having similar thoughts – but is it possible that this is happening in your business? More than possible I’d say; it’s very likely.

To get around this problem of employees not knowing what to do with ideas I recommend that all businesses have an “idea-home” – a place to deposit, collect and keep ideas. This needn’t be fancy; for a small business a spreadsheet that everyone is able to access will do, for a larger business you may want to use a wiki.

At it’s simplest the idea-home is where employees record their ideas. You ask them to submit their ideas to the ‘idea-home’ together with enough information to make the idea sound compelling but not so much information that entering data into the system becomes off-putting.

If you want to get more sophisticated you can extend the idea-home to include a place where other employees can comment on submitted ideas, and you can add a ‘progress’ column so that everyone can see whether and how the idea has been implemented.

And that brings us neatly on to action. Employees will only use the idea-home if they trust that ideas submitted to it will be reviewed. A neat way to make this happen is to select a small group of people – an “idea team” – to review the ideas each week/month and work out next steps.

This is the simplest and most effective way of improving the number of ideas flowing into your business and because we all know that to be innovative you need lots of ideas why don’t you give it a go right now.

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Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses: Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business” and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).