How to Save Good Ideas

When it comes to gaining buy-in for a new idea, we've been taught to focus on getting the idea right instead of on making sure people understand and support it. That, explains Kotter, has left us unprepared to deal with the attacks that can kill off even the most carefully developed concepts. In this edited interview, the leadership expert discusses various idea-killing attacks and offers some rules for responding to them. Whether you're working on a small deal with just a few players or a large-scale change effort in an organization of thousands, you're in the "murky land of human nature and group dynamics," Kotter says. People's anxieties and opinions color the way they react to new ideas. Kotter and Lorne Whitehead have identified four common ways that people shoot down ideas: fear-mongering, death by delay, confusion, and ridicule. Marginalizing the troublemakers might seem like the obvious response, but Kotter and Whitehead have found that people who were effective at gaining support for their ideas invited naysayers to critique their ideas and treated them with respect. They also communicated clearly and simply, never let the disagreement become personal, attended to the entire group instead of just to the most vocal critics, and prepared responses to a variety of potential attacks. Learning how to win buy-in for an idea is a basic life skill, Kotter says-one that is as relevant to a student working on a group project as it is to an executive in a business setting.

• Decision making
• Psychology and neuroscience
• Group dynamics
• Presentation skills
• Organizational behavior