Courage to share risky ideas

[dennisgorelik]

I and my new trainee discussed his idea about how to optimize our job feeds integration process [that my trainee learns].
The trainee's optimization idea turned out to be incorrect [which is unsurprising for a newbie].
I talked about a balance between our desire to learn from new suggestions vs our desire to avoid spending time on discussing too many mistakes.
My recommendation range: definitely more than zero suggestions per day, but less than several hundred incorrect suggestions per day.
My trainee had only several suggestions today, but he felt that he suggested too much.

My follow-up message to the trainee:
~~~~~~~
Please remember how you incorrectly predicted whether you are oversuggesting or undersuggesting.
You thought that you are oversuggesting (too many mistakes), but, actually, you are undersuggesting (too few suggestions).
That mistake [of being too cautious] is typical.
You frequently will feel that you are making too many mistakes in your suggestions. That feeling is incorrect. You should watch for that "what if I am wrong?" bias and remind yourself that you should discuss your ideas even if your ideas are likely to turn out to be incorrect.
Sharing your idea and identifying holes in your idea -- will help you to adjust your mental model and generate better ideas in the future.
If you fail to frequently share your ideas -- you will not learn fast enough and is likely to fail at your job.
~~~~~~~

Comments

[dennisgorelik]

How is “Creativity is just connecting things” quote relevant to my story?

[juan_gandhi]

Incompetent generalization, I think. That's what I observe.

Generalization

[dennisgorelik]

> Incompetent generalization

Generalization by who?

Re: Generalization

[juan_gandhi]

By both parties. You and Jobs.

Incompetent Generalization

[dennisgorelik]

Could you please quote my generalization [that you find incompetent]?
I could not find what you are referring to.

Re: Incompetent Generalization

[juan_gandhi]

Well, the whole story. If you were talking about carefully, cautiously implementing new ideas, sorting them by importance, and experimenting, it's one thing. Mixing all new ideas in a pile of "100 per day vs 2 per day" tells me that all this looks more like some kind of nonsense that you are happy to promote to maintain your authority. So, the generalization is about ascribing an importance to ideas, I suspect, based on the rank of the one who comes up with the ideas. I may be wrong.

Re: Incompetent Generalization

[dennisgorelik]

> Mixing all new ideas in a pile of "100 per day vs 2 per day"

Your interpretation of what I wrote - resembles what I wrote, but there is a significant mismatch between what I meant vs your interpretation.
1) I wrote "[2 ... 100] ideas per day", but that does not mean that ideas will be mixed in a pile.
Every idea will be discussed separately from each other.
2) My recommendation in this posting - is not about how to discuss ideas, but about picking correct self-censorship level in regards of expressing raw/incomplete ideas.

How else do you give a guideline about how to find a right balance between "sharing raw ideas" and "verifying ideas before sharing"?

> tells me that all this looks more like some kind of nonsense

Yes, it looks like a nonsense ... because of misunderstanding.
This misunderstanding is, mostly, my fault (I did not learn yet how to clearly explain my guidelines for making balanced choices).

Re: Incompetent Generalization

[juan_gandhi]

Good point(s).