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gdubs

Congrats, you've killed the idea in its infancy because you demanded answers to questions before it could even walk.

Ideas need time to be explored, and given a chance.

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>Ideas need time to be explored, and given a chance.

sure, and the time for that is before you bring them to potential critics.

unless a meeting is intended as a brainstorming session where any thought, no matter how unformed, is welcome, meetings are not a time to present your initial unexplored thoughts to colleagues, bosses, or other departments. take a couple days, think about it without spending other people's time, try to imagine people's objections and have answers to them. then present. shouting things out in a meeting before you've considered and come up with answers to the most obvious counter-arguments is just a time-waster.

You must have very different kinds of meetings than I do. Unless you're going into that meeting with a rehearsed PowerPoint presentation, or there's a strict agenda that doesn't allow any time for exploration, I expect to hear imperfect-ideas-in-infancy. One of the reasons we have meetings is to allow collaboration to happen. It's a format for working together.

Yes, meetings vary profoundly in terms of their quality, purpose, and participation. For instance, is it a meeting of peers, or are managers in the room? If there's a large disparity of roles in attendance (e.g., junior engineers, marketing managers, and maybe one or two executives), it's different than if it's a true meeting of peers. And if managers are capable of attending those meetings without quashing collaboration, hats off to them.

> Ideas need time to be explored, and given a chance.

Then go back, address the objections, and re-propose.

If you can't explain at least a little bit of "why this is worth at least digging into", that's on you.

If your idea is so in its infancy, that you can't explain its business case to people, even just hypothetically, than its too young to share.

Ideas are cheap. Everyone has them.

Sure, but it's sort of dumb for me to bring an idea I value to the table until I have answers to all the obvious questions.

I owe it to my colleagues to not make them the bad guys by shooting down an idea.

Really depends on the context I think, brainstorming session? Naysaying does have a habbit of stunting an idea's growth in the session. Sometimes you need to imagine you've solved a bunch of hard problems before you can explore the value the idea has.

I say this as a semi-reformed naysayer. I am critical of implementation plans, but let ideas breath a bit in a more exploratory setting before I start bringing up constraints.

Isn’t proving a market exists, building a proof of concept, etc, all examples of exploring an idea? Those seem like perfectly reasonable expectations.

If the proof of concept takes an hour to code up, or proving the market exists just takes a bit of googling, then sure, you can prepare that before the first meeting where you suggest the idea.

If the proof of concept requires spending a few days in the machine shop making jigs and parts, purchasing equipment, and a custom PCB, then I really hope you'll bring it up for discussion beforehand in a meeting. Ten minutes of discussion with colleagues might be as useful as several iterations of prototyping. Not so that they'll shoot it down, but because someone might say "oh yeah, we have a spare mcguffin from last year's demo that you can use, should save you lots of time."

If an idea is dead because it couldn't survive its first public outing, that's probably a good thing.

If you really believe in an idea, even if you first put it forward to the wrong hostile audience, you will have other opportunities to make your case.

In improvisational theatre, negativity is known as "blocking". It frustrates the imagination. It's very harmful to clowns.

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