We all remember that kid in high school or college that nobody dared speak up around.The one with the quick wit and deep cutting sarcasm, where an innocent commenter confession could become an embarrassment you carried for a week. Or for life. And ironically, instead of avoiding them, everyone strived to please that “queen bee”. Unfortunately, I have seen this same dynamic invade the creative process.

We have all been at that brainstorm where the senior team comes in with finished ideas, tied to the brief, and proudly puts them on the wall. You can see it in the eyes of the more junior people in the room: the self-doubt, the fear of being ridiculed by their own "lesser" thoughts. Any half-baked idea seems discouraged. If you are not ready to defend your thinking with sword and cape, do not even bother putting it on the board. This is not a brainstorm. This is a barnstorm. Not necessarily of the most creative or the wisest, but an environment that rewards pettiness, loudness and arrogance.

The barbed dismissal. The smirk. The question not designed to clarify and explore, but to expose and destroy. This destroys the whole power of a brainstorm. A storm of ideas, of often dissociated thoughts that can help lateral thinking and bring forward unexpected results.

The warped learning over time is to stop offering the half-formed thought. To wait until you are more certain, or the big cheese is in the room. To protect what you have, to ensure ownership, to minimize risk. So the best ideas, the ones that with a little air and a little time and a lot of teamwork could be great, never make it out.

My goal, having worked in those environments, is to never run one.

There is a passage in Plato (I can hear my teammates groan as I write this: "there he goes again with the classic stuff") where Socrates, having been declared the wisest man in Athens, goes looking for someone wiser. He talks to politicians, poets, craftsmen. What he finds is that the people most certain of their knowledge are the ones with the least of it. The people worth talking to are the ones willing to say: I am not sure. What do you think?

His conclusion was not that he knew more than everyone else, but more importantly, that he was able to admit to himself and everybody, that he was aware that he didn’t know everything “he knew he knew nothing”. And that admission, that genuine openness, was what kept him learning.

I think about that a lot. Not as a leadership principle. As a daily practice for everyone on the team. The willingness to not know. To not see knowledge as your only currency. The real power is to create a healthy environment where knowledge and creativity flow freely, in every direction. To ask the junior writer or account manager what she thinks. To let the developer's question reframe the brief. To hear something from someone you did not expect it from, and add to it and help it grow, without needing to be the one who said it first.

That is notweakness. That is how you stay sharp.

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"The opportunity is not to discover the perfect company for ourselves. The opportunity is to build the perfect company for each other."

— Simon Sinek

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Simon Sinek said it well: the opportunity is not to discover the perfect company for ourselves. The opportunity is to build the perfect company for each other.

That is the team worth building. Not the one that makes you look good. The one that makes everyone in it better than they were before they joined.

You stay sharp by staying around sharp people. You grow by demanding the best from each other, not by protecting yourself from it. The room gets better when nobody in itneeds to be the smartest person in it.
‍That is how iron sharpens iron.

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