Teams That Believe
“The Best Idea Wins”
Still Judge the Person Before the Idea.

For decades, management books have told a story about a power company whose lines kept icing over. In one telling, the person running a session on the problem insisted on bringing in people from many jobs: linemen, supervisors, accountants and secretaries. One lineman joked about training bears to climb the poles and shake the ice off. The room laughed, listed reasons it was silly and made some comments about the lineman who said it.

Someone suggested honey pots on top of the poles to lure the bears up, and that got more laughs. A senior lineman, with some sarcasm, suggested borrowing the executives’ helicopters to put the pots up. The room laughed again.

Then a secretary spoke for the first time. She asked whether the wind from a helicopter flown low over the lines would shake them enough to knock the ice off. This time the room went quiet.

Leaders have long given some version of this advice: “The best idea wins, no matter who it is from.” The story shows why it matters. People in different jobs, and people who think differently, notice different things about the same problem. The answer came from the person the room least expected, and she noticed the wind a helicopter makes.

The advice tells everyone, from a new hire to an executive, that rank will not decide whose idea is heard. It is good advice, and you should keep giving it.

Yet the same room also made comments about the lineman who suggested the bears. Teams judge the person who raised an idea while believing they are judging the idea.

In the story, nobody says who will make the call, or what an idea will be judged on. When nobody says those two things, an unwritten rule fills the gap. That rule says an idea should come in finished, from someone who does that kind of work.

Some people on your team pick up the rule in the moment, from a reaction like the laughter at the bear idea. Others work it out over many meetings, by keeping track of which ideas got laughed off, and why. Either way, they spend effort predicting how their idea will be judged. That effort is cognitive load, and none of it goes into improving their idea.

So someone with an unfinished idea may bring it late, or trimmed to look finished. Someone whose idea is about work they do not do may not bring it at all. Those are the ideas the advice was meant to bring in. Then your team decides without the thinking you hired those people for.

Replace the unwritten rule with a stated one, in two steps. First, pick the person who will make the call, before any idea is on the table. My Decision Charter starts with this step.

Choose someone who is not proposing an idea of their own. If you have an idea yourself, choose someone else.

Then add two sentences to the message where you ask for ideas: who decides, and what every idea will be judged on. You can also say them as the meeting starts.

Here is how the two sentences read if the ice is your team’s problem this week: “Our field supervisor will decide how we keep ice off the lines, and she is not pitching an idea of her own. She will judge every idea, finished or not, on what it would fix and how we could test it.”

When the ideas come in writing, take the names off and run the ideas through an AI tool with the prompt below. The AI restates each idea plainly and lists its open questions, without picking a winner. Then the person deciding reads each idea without knowing who raised it. That person still makes the call.

A half-formed idea then gets heard while it can still help. Its gaps become questions to answer, and sometimes it is the best idea you get.

Help the person deciding read each of my team’s ideas without knowing who raised it. Restate each idea in one plain sentence, without saying who raised it. For each, say what it would fix if it works, list the questions it leaves open, and give the quickest way to test it. If an idea is unfinished, say what would finish it, and do not count its gaps against it. The person deciding makes the call, so do not rank the ideas, choose one, or argue for or against any idea. If anything is unclear, ask me. The question being decided, the role of the person who will decide it, and the ideas: [paste here]