As a leader of a tech workforce or any group of employees, you will have either spoken or heard the (in)famous saying, “There are no bad ideas.” This
saying is often used at the beginning of a brainstorming session or to open a discussion, and it’s meant to elicit a wider range of contributions.

I know I have had bad ideas—about professional decisions, how to relate to my partner, how to treat my children, how to fill some time, and many more (and that doesn’t even include my high school or college years).

Even though I am a firm believer in the existence of bad ideas, I also recognize that there is something positive that can be drawn from bad ideas. It doesn’t make the ideas themselves any better—yet it’s a positive consequence to watch for. And the kicker is that these positive consequences are often greater for bad ideas because with the outcome of a great idea, we might be so busy celebrating that we overlook a learning experience.

Here are some real benefits of bad ideas:

• We learn from them—even from turning bad ideas into reality. As long as they remain in our heads, there’s always the lingering thought that it might have been a great idea. But now that we’ve done it, we know. Very often, it takes mistakes to land successful attempts at doing something. The photographer DeWitt Jones famously revealed how it takes him thousands of shots just to get a couple intoNational Geographic. The “error rate” of his work is somewhere around 99.9 percent. For many of us, this is unacceptable. Yet he recognizes that it’s necessary to land the very few extraordinary shots that leave the viewer in awe.
• We build a culture of accepting mistakes. Maybe everyone else saw it as the horrible idea that it turned out to be. But if we only allow what everyone believes to be great happen, we won’t learn to accept and manage mistakes. Let’s get better at that.
• Our judgement may be wrong—and the idea might turn into something great after all. Last week, my son suggested we watch the movie Birdemic. He had heard it was one of the worst movies of all time. The transitions between scenes had mismatched audio, sometimes the scenes were cut in the middle of the dialogue, and most of the dialogue was awful. . . . I could go on and on—it’s a terrible movie, and there are not many redeeming features about it. However, despite earning the reputation of being one of the worst movies ever, unbelievable to most movie viewers, it has developed a following exactly because of this. There is now a Birdemic 2, and a Birdemic 3 is in the planning. (Don’t watch any of them—they are all horrible).

 

Take the Next Step

This week, take notice of the ideas that you believe to be bad ideas, and consider accepting them anyway. Let your team members go with it. See what happens. Make sure there is learning; watch your culture grow—and be ready to be surprised.