Every Breakthrough Starts
As A Bad Idea To Somebody.
Somebody on your team can already see a better way of doing something. Whether they say it out loud is almost entirely down to you.
Mexico City, 1968. The Olympic high jump.
Everybody jumped the same way. You ran at the bar and went over it feet first, because that was how it was done and had always been done.
Then a tall, lanky guy named Dick Fosbury took his run up, turned his back on the bar, and threw himself over it backwards, landing on his shoulders.
It looked ridiculous. It looked like somebody falling.
He won gold and set an Olympic record. Today every single serious high jumper in the world does it his way, and the technique carries his name.
Different works. But here is the part I care about for teams.
He had to do it in front of everybody first.
Before it was the standard, it was a guy doing something visibly strange in public while people watched. Every breakthrough starts as a bad idea to somebody, and the person with the idea always has to absorb that first.
Before it was the standard
it was one person doing
something that looked
completely wrong.
Somebody on your team already knows
Here is what I would put money on. Somebody who works for you can see a better way of doing something right now.
Maybe it is a process that wastes an hour a week. Maybe it is a handoff that keeps failing. Maybe it is something about how new people are trained that everybody works around and nobody has fixed.
They have not told you. And the reason is almost never that they do not care.
It is that at some point they did the arithmetic on what it would cost them to say it, and decided against.
This is the most measured thing in team performance
I want to be careful not to make this sound soft, because it is one of the better evidenced findings in the whole field.
Google ran a two year study called Project Aristotle to work out what makes teams effective. They analysed 180 teams and over 250 variables, expecting the answer to be about talent and composition.
It was not. Who was on the team mattered far less than how the team worked together, and the strongest single predictor of effectiveness was psychological safety, the shared belief that you can speak up, disagree, or admit a mistake without being punished for it. It outranked collective intelligence, technical skill and experience. It was also the prerequisite for the other four factors they found.
The idea came from Amy Edmondson at Harvard, and one detail from her original hospital research is worth knowing. Units with higher psychological safety reported more errors. Not because they made more. Because they were willing to say so.
Read that last part again, because it is the whole thing. The safer team looked worse on paper and was actually better, and any leader who judged those units by their error reports alone would have drawn exactly the wrong conclusion.
Edmondson is also careful about what this is not. It is not niceness. In her words, it is about candour rather than being warm and fuzzy. It is about being direct, taking risks, and being willing to say I got that wrong.
Psychological safety is not making everyone comfortable. It is making dissent survivable, particularly dissent that points upward.
It is decided in about four seconds
Whether your team brings you the Fosbury idea is not settled by a values statement or an open door policy. It is settled by what happened the last time somebody said something inconvenient in front of other people.
They watched your face. They noticed whether you got curious or got defensive. They noticed whether the person who raised it got thanked or got quietly managed afterwards.
Everybody in that room drew a conclusion, and it was not about that one idea. It was about whether it is worth having ideas here.
That is why this compounds so badly. You do not get a notification when someone decides to stop contributing. There is no exit interview for an idea. The room just gets quieter over a couple of years and everyone calls it alignment.
The version I would actually watch for
Silence in a meeting is not agreement. It is usually just silence.
If your meetings have one or two people talking and everybody else nodding, you do not have a team that agrees with you. You have a team that has learned where the conversation is genuinely open and where it is theatre. Google found the same thing, incidentally. On their best teams, people spoke in roughly equal proportion.
And be honest about what you are optimising for. Most of us say we want people to challenge us and then feel a flash of irritation when they do. That flash is readable from across a room, and people calibrate to it much faster than they calibrate to anything you say.
You never get told
when somebody decides
to stop bringing
you their ideas.
Making it safe to be the person with the strange idea
- Ask the quiet person by name. Not generally, into the room. Directly. The people with the clearest view of a broken process are usually the ones closest to it and lowest in the room.
- Respond to the first bad idea well. Everyone is watching how you handle the one that is genuinely not very good. Thank the person for raising it, engage with it seriously, then explain your thinking. That interaction sets the price for the next twenty.
- Say when you were wrong, out loud. Edmondson’s point about candour cuts both directions. A leader who never admits an error is telling the team that errors are unspeakable here.
- Close the loop. If somebody raises something and nothing visibly happens, they learn that speaking up is decorative. Tell them what you did with it, even when the answer is that you decided against it and why.
What Fosbury actually needed
The thing about that jump is that the physics were always available. Nothing had changed about gravity or about the human body. The technique had been possible for as long as there had been a bar to get over.
What it needed was one person willing to look foolish in front of a stadium.
Your team has ideas of roughly that shape sitting in it right now. Not Olympic ones, but the equivalent for your building. The question is not whether the ideas exist. It is whether anybody thinks it is worth the risk of saying them near you.
If you see a better way, bring it up. And if you lead people, make that a safe thing to have done.
Somebody on your team can already see a better way and has decided it is not worth saying. Google studied 180 teams and found psychological safety was the strongest predictor of effectiveness, ahead of talent and experience, and Edmondson found that safer teams report more errors rather than fewer because they are honest about them. This is not about being nice. It is about whether disagreement survives, and it is decided by how you reacted the last time somebody said something inconvenient.
Keynotes and
workshops.
Chris works with teams in the boardroom and the locker room on standards, peer accountability, and building teams where nobody hides and nobody coasts. Sessions leave behind a written team standard the group authored themselves.
Response within one business day
The Team Playbook
A ready to run guide for turning this into real conversations with the people you lead. Free and printable, no email required.
