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*Set to cheesy game show music*

If you lead a dynamic team with a broad set of skills and varying levels of experience, it’s likely that team meetings and brainstorming sessions are dominated by a small subset of “experts” on the team. While it’s unquestionably important to have input from your experts, it’s actually harmful to the whole team’s performance to only hear from them.

Google recently published research on what differentiates top performing teams from the rest. What they found is that high psychological safety within a team was strongly correlated with high performance. They defined psychological safety as:

“[The] shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.” Psychological safety is “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up. […] It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.”¹

I wrote about trust and high performing teams a while ago, and this further validates the work presented there.

So where does the Bad Idea Game fit in? The Bad Idea Game directly improves psychological safety by eliminating the fear of rejection for a bad idea. It encourages participation from the whole team, levels the playing field between different skills and expertise, and helps inform better decision making informed by broader perspective. Here’s the setup:

Without the Bad Idea Game…

You present a new challenge to the team during a team call or meeting, and are looking for the team’s feedback on how to address the challenge. The usual suspects chime in, sharing smart ideas confidently, but you don’t hear from everyone. The other members of the team remain silent, perhaps believing their idea would be laughed at or rejected or that it’s already been thought of and discarded by the “smarter” people on the team. Your team misses out on a broader set of perspectives and potential new way of solving the challenge

Using the Bad Idea Game…

You present a new challenge to the team, but instead ask the team to first come up with the worst possible ways of solving the problem. Everyone on the team begins offering terrible ideas, most of which generate a good chuckle or cringe for all involved. Now the creative juices are flowing, and the fear of rejection for offering a bad idea has been eliminated. Eventually, someone will chime in with a “wait, what if we did that but this way…” and the team moves on to discussing actual solutions. You maintain the momentum after each real solution by soliciting additional solutions from the team before evaluating pros and cons. Once you have a good list and participation from the team, then you dig in with the team on evaluating your good options.

I invented the Bad Idea Game after realizing we were leaving a lot of great insights unexplored because some members of the team weren’t as likely to speak up in a team setting. They would come to me 1:1 after the team discussion with great alternatives, which then made for an awkward rehash of the conversation at the next team meeting. The Bad Idea Game has sped up my ability to make smart and well-informed decisions while increasing psychological safety for the team. And we get to have fun and a few laughs along the way.

1. Charles Duhigg, “What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team,” New York Times Magazine, February 25, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html?smid=pl-share ↩︎