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Shooting down ideas is not a skill

scottlawsonbc.com

11–20 of 187 posts

Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill

#11
post #2

The least productive teams I've been a part of are the ones where everyone is waiting for their turn to say why an idea is bad. Sometimes being "too smart" can hold you back from building something genuinely new.

Common failure mode in environments that promote being the best over getting things done: If you went from school to college to industry always identifying with being better than everyone else, because that's what it takes to get in the door, sometimes you miss the transition to when you're already in the door. A lot of people don't realize they were supposed to put their guards down until it's too late. It's too bad but this is what the cutthroat labor pipeline rewards.

Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill

#12
This is how we get 'design by committee', where no one wants to shoot ideas down and there is no vision. Sometimes ideas should be shot down. I would go so far as to say that most ideas should be. Very few people are discovering how to make fire.

Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill

#13
post #9
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, the irony...

Knowing how to stop a bad idea is a skill. Knowing when it's a bad idea is a skill. Knowing when you don't know is a skill. There's more than one skill in life. More than one may be applicable to a situation. Everyone on this forum has probably run into one of the "idea guys" who just need a tech cofounder to do the coding for 2% equity.

I expect the comment was about your (pre-edit) "there doing" vs the current "they're doing", shame you didn't acknowledge your mistake in the change.

Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill

#14
post #13
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowing how to stop a bad idea is a skill. Knowing when it's a bad idea is a skill. Knowing when you don't know is a skill. There's more than one skill in life. More than one may be applicable to a situation. Everyone on this forum has probably run into one of the "idea guys" who just need a tech cofounder to do the coding for 2% equity.

I expect the comment was about your (pre-edit) "there doing" vs the current "they're doing", shame you didn't acknowledge your mistake in the change.

At no point did my comment say "there doing".

Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill

#15
post #4
post #3

Yes, it is. > The person proposing has been thinking about this for weeks or months. This doesn't mean they know what they're doing. Their thoughts can be bad .

Oh, the irony...

i dont agree with the self-indemnifying approach. let us apply this concept to itself - what could go wrong with not shooting down ideas? a lot of time could be wasted giving credence to that which is invalid. for example, ive just donated my energy debating the merits of an article that was probably written by a large language model (this is a judgement based on overt presence of negative parallelism, punchy prose, tripartite sentence structure, AI generated image, ...) - on a personal basis id prefer to have spent my time otherwise, as this entire argument can be summed as "be curious, not judgemental". therefore shooting this one down was probably a good idea?

Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill

#16
It's definitely a skill. Perverting the organization into a support ecosystem for naysayers is not a trivial thing. It often takes years of meticulous, behind-the-scenes manipulation before these people can begin to reliably suppress ideas without getting called out.

Re: Shooting down ideas is not a skill

#17
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect the comment was about your (pre-edit) "there doing" vs the current "they're doing", shame you didn't acknowledge your mistake in the change.

At no point did my comment say "there doing".

Great, so what did your comment say the first time?
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