I’ve spent a lot of time around tables with clever people who have big ideas, people who can synthesise concepts and make leaps from one potential application to another.  This ability allows ideas to breed inside their minds, to branch, to generate offspring which are just as complex and flighty.

It’s beautiful, and it may be necessary, but it’s not very helpful because these people are entrepreneurs, they’re business people.  They work in teams and teams need to understand what they’re doing.  Teams need shared clarity.

Unfortunately, all too often, these glorious butterfly minds can’t bring anyone else along on their journeys, they can’t persuade, or convince, or even explain.

“Whatever cannot be said clearly is probably not being thought clearly either.”

Peter Singer

But don’t worry, we can fix it. We can spend time with these ideas-fountains (and believe me, it’s a wonderful way to spend time), we can patiently interrogate them, stop them when they go too fast, ask them to say it again in different words. Don’t be afraid of looking like an idiot, everyone knows you’re not! We can capture their ideas, reframe them in shareable forms, we can prioritise them, and run them through models of thinking which help us determine which stand the best chances of flourishing in the wild. Then we can turn them into plans and projects and deliverables. We can build something from them.

So please (PLEASE!) next time you’re around a table with one of these wonders, don’t just give up on the note taking at the third cognitive dog leg and spend the rest of the meeting nodding along, waiting for the sandwiches to come.

Instead, stand up.  Get the biggest sheet of paper you can find and a fistful of pens.  Tease clarity out of the chaos and share it with the rest of the team.

Or get me to.  I’d love that SO much.

The Peter Singer quote is from the Introduction to his 2016 book Ethics in the Real World: 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter (Link to it on Amazon.co.uk).