Where do you go to have a bad idea?

Not a rhetorical question. An actual one.

Somewhere you can say, "This might be complete bollocks, but…" and then spend twenty minutes finding out whether it is.

Because the more senior you get, the fewer of those places there are.

Every conversation has a consequence

Talk to your boss and you are being assessed, even when you are not.

Talk to your team and thinking out loud becomes direction. You say maybe we should look at X, and by Thursday somebody has built a workstream around it.

Not because they misunderstood you. Because that is what happens when someone with your job says a thing out loud.

Talk to a peer and there is territory in the room, whether either of you wants it there.

Talk to the board and the expectation is that you have already thought it through. That is what the meeting is for.

None of those are failures of the people involved. They are all working exactly as intended.

It is just that between them, there is nowhere left to put an unfinished thought.

What I had, and did not value at the time

I had someone in my corporate career I could do this with. My old boss.

I called him Chief. He called me Captain.

It was a confidential space by design. No ego, nothing to be gained politically, nothing that left the room.

He was not there to agree with me, and that was the entire value.

One of those conversations started with me saying we should get rid of hierarchy.

I was sick of it. It was a frustrated idea, not a serious one, and in any other room I would probably have kept it to myself.

We pulled at it for a while.

What came out had nothing to do with hierarchy.

The real problem was that the key leaders from the same business were sitting in different silos and rarely getting around the same table.

So that is what we changed.

And it worked. It changed how that part of the business ran.

The original idea was rubbish.

The thing underneath it was not.

Nobody put that conversation in anyone's objectives. It was just a thing that existed, and I did not value it properly until it was gone.

What most people use instead

Most senior people I talk to have somewhere they think out loud.

A partner. An old colleague. A trusted peer. Sometimes they work brilliantly.

But those relationships were rarely designed for this.

For this kind of unfinished thinking.

Where the other person understands enough context that you do not spend half the conversation explaining it.

Where there is nothing political at stake.

Where changing your mind is the point rather than a sign that you came in unprepared.

And where the person opposite you is prepared to tell you the idea is rubbish and keep pulling at it until you both understand what is underneath.

Some leaders have that.

A surprising number do not.

Which means they can arrive at a significant decision having never once said the unfinished version of it to another human being.

The part I keep coming back to

The thinking you most need to do out loud is often the thinking that costs most to do out loud.

I do not think that is a wellbeing problem.

It is a thinking problem.

And it gets harder the further up you go, because your words carry more weight before you have even decided what you think.

So, genuinely.

Where do you go?

Andrew