Insight

Seventy-Three Ideas, One Made It Out

Clare·Sunday, October 11, 2026 Edition

WHEN THE ROOM GOES QUIET

Seventy-three ideas. That is how many Solenne Mbeki counted on the whiteboard after the retreat — three days, four facilitators, a rented lodge with good coffee and bad Wi-Fi. One made it into production. Not because the other seventy-two were bad. Because they were never quite finished being said before the room moved on.

An idea in its first hour is not a proposal — it is a guess, and the person holding it knows exactly how close guessing sits to looking foolish. What gets surfaced in a group is not what people think. It is what people believe they are allowed to think aloud. Psychological safety is not warmth or niceness or a team that laughs together at lunch. It is the specific belief, held individually, that speaking up will not cost you standing. Without it, people edit before they open their mouths, and the editing is ruthless.

Pixar has a documented practice called "plussing". When a colleague responds to an early idea, they are expected to build on it rather than evaluate it. The rule sounds minor. The effect is not. It changes what the first speaker risks, which changes what the first speaker says, which changes what is available to build on at all. Ed Catmull wrote about this in "Creativity, Inc." as foundational to how the studio actually made things, not as a wellness initiative.

THE IDEA YOU HAVEN'T SAID YET

Say you are sitting with something half-formed. A direction, a reframe, a question that keeps returning. The meeting is in forty minutes. You already know which colleague will land on the gap in it before you have finished the sentence, and you are running the mental calculation: share it rough, or wait until it is tighter. That calculation is the whole problem. A tighter idea is a safer idea, and a safer idea is a smaller one. The thing you're deciding right now is not whether the idea is ready. It is whether the room is.

Solenne's seventy-two lost ideas did not disappear because the people in that lodge lacked imagination. They disappeared because imagination without safety is just private. And private is where most of the best thinking ends up staying.

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Try This

Before your next team meeting, write down one idea you have been mentally shelving as "not ready yet." Bring it anyway, labeled as unfinished — and notice whether the room's response makes you more likely or less likely to speak early next time.

How?

Key Facts

*Psychological safety isn't a soft perk — it's the structural condition that determines whether original thinking reaches the room at all.

*Pixar's 'plussing' norm shows that protecting fragile early ideas from premature judgment is what turns raw creative risk into finished work.

*Before your next meeting, name one idea you've been quietly carrying and decide what protection it would need to survive being said out loud.