The Tyranny of New Ideas

If you possess the gift of ideation, your brain is wired to generate lots of new ideas. Many visionary leaders have the gift of ideation. This can be a gift, but without an appropriate system of checks and balances, idea generation can become a form of organizational tyranny, in which support staff is constantly developing those new ideas.

Miss Bobbi’s Place

Zac sat in my office, ready to launch Miss Bobbi’s Place, a nonprofit daring to keep homeless families together, unlike any program in York. As a school teacher, he had witnessed the pain of family separation and was determined to help, with his family’s support behind him.

Working with the Redevelopment Authority of York City (RDA), Miss Bobbi’s Place secured five connected townhomes on West Hope Avenue. The properties were essentially a shell, having been gutted and abandoned by a previous developer.

At the time, I was a member of the RDA board. This project was innovative in its approach to redevelopment and programming.

Zac took the necessary time to create the vision and began sharing it with potential funders. Now they were at a critical juncture of deciding what structure would be needed to oversee the project.

I cautioned Zac about the challenges of starting a new 501(c)(3) and suggested a lesser-known and quicker way to bring his vision to life: fiscal sponsorship.

When you use a fiscal sponsor, you choose to operate your program under the umbrella of another established 501(c)(3) organization. They handle the administration of donations and provide board oversight to the project, ensuring compliance with IRS regulations.

Zac chose to launch Miss Bobbi’s Place under a fiscal sponsorship agreement with a local homeless ministry. This allowed them to begin raising funds to bring their dream of Unlikely Good to life.

Although the administration of the fiscal sponsorship was less than ideal, this step enabled them to get the project moving, equipping them to launch the ministry in 2021. They would later create their own 501(c)(3), after a period of organizational maturity.

Today, Miss Bobbi’s Place is thriving, operating several family housing units that keep formerly homeless families together.

They also resisted working in a silo as a Lone Ranger by joining hands with an established coalition of local nonprofit partners already addressing poverty and homelessness. They partnered with the Community Progress Council to identify families and provide case management, ensuring those families have access to the resources they need to achieve sustainability.

From their partnership to acquire property through the RDA, to sourcing families and case management through CPC, and to utilizing the fiscal sponsorship model, Zac and Miss Bobbi’s Place launched with a thoughtful, collaborative structure. Today, they are meeting a targeted need that no one else in the community was offering.

Don’t Skip Activation

Miss Bobbi’s Place is a beautiful vision of the kind of Unlikely Good possible in small cities. This small but highly effective nonprofit is off to a successful start because it did not move quickly from idea generation to implementation.

In Patrick Lencioni’s Six Types of Working Genius, he suggests that teams often make a fatal mistake by jumping directly from ideation to implementation, skipping the activation phase.

Activation is the phase where ideas are first discerned. People who have the gift of discernment exercise judgment. They have a good intuition that helps them evaluate plans and ideas to determine which are likely to succeed.

There are numerous potentially innovative ideas available. Not all of them are timely or appropriate for the moment. A good discernment process will help determine which ideas are suitable to pursue.

Zac and his team exercised the gift of discernment in delaying the creation of a new 501(c)(3), a wise and prudent decision. They also took the time to survey the community's needs. You might call this “practicing collective discernment”; that is, they talked to other local nonprofit partners to decide what service was needed that would not be a duplication of efforts.

Slow Down

The lesson is relatively simple. Don’t choke off idea generation. Allow your visionaries to generate ideas.

But do take the time to adequately discern those ideas.

What questions need to be asked?

Who are the right people to ask?

What are the implications of this new project, nonprofit, or ministry?

Have we calculated the real human and financial costs of launching this initiative?

As one of those visionaries who generates a lot of ideas, I am so grateful for the people and checks and balances that have helped me properly discern and activate an idea. I have likely avoided a lot of pain that would have been caused by an idea that seemed good at the time, but really needed to die.

Visionaries, don’t tyrannize your organization with a constant stream of unvetted ideas.

The good ideas that were actually worth implementing were also made better by that same process.

Slow down. Ask the right questions and activate your best ideas with quality and integrity.