Ideas

What's the best way to share ideas at work?

To come up with ideas, I usually start by myself. It's helpful to then get some other people to develop your ideas.

I like to listen to conversations around me, maybe in meetings. What I'll then do is try and hear for things that could be missing.

In today's episode of Office English, we're talking about brainstorming and developing ideas.

Hello and welcome to Office English, your podcast guide to the world of work. I'm Pippa.

And I'm Phil. You can read along with this podcast using the transcript or

So, we've just heard from our Learning English colleagues about how they talk about ideas at work. Do you enjoy coming up with ideas at work, Phil?

I do, and I think it's quite a big thing in our job.

I actually, I personally do like talking about ideas, but I find it really stressful if there's a lot of pressure to come up with an idea.

Do you find it easier to come up with ideas yourself or working together with other people?

Definitely working together with other people.

I don't know. I think I might find it easier to come up with bad ideas on my own, but I think when you work together with other people, you can refine them and come up with something that actually works.

Mhm. Yeah. So today we'll be talking about how to share ideas, develop ideas and how to make sure that good ideas actually happen. OK. Let's start with coming up with ideas. Let's imagine you're at a team meeting Phil, and your boss has asked everyone about their ideas for an upcoming project. What's the best way to share your ideas?

Well, first, it's probably good just to say all the things you've got in your head. 'I've been thinking...' Or 'one idea I had...' Or 'how about...' you're making suggestions of things that might be possible.

Yeah, and it depends on the context and how you'll talk about ideas. So you might have been asked to prepare ideas in advance or this might be a more relaxed, informal discussion. And if it's the latter you could just ask some questions rather than kind of suggesting things. So you can ask things like 'what's the priority?' 'What limitations do we have?' And that kind of helps everyone kind of understand more about what's required and think about their own ideas.

Yes, it can help you come up with ideas that are more suitable or more appropriate because they fit into that framework.

Yeah. And sometimes ideas come more naturally once the conversation begins. That's what I find personally. And so if that happens, you can say things like, oh, 'this is just off the top of my head', or 'I'm just thinking out loud here' before you introduce your idea. What do you think about that, Phil?

I like them. And I think if you've got a, you're in a good environment where you can say anything and work with it, then they can be quite good. But obviously ideas that just come off the top of your head are not things that you've necessarily thought about that deeply. So they might be bad ideas. And it could be that in some situations you don't want to be seen as the person who's coming up with bad ideas. And so that might depend on the atmosphere and the culture where you work. OK, we've talked about how to share ideas, but next we might want to develop an idea. And this means that you take an initial idea and discuss or think about it further. What do you think is the best approach?

Well, sometimes you might want to do this in the middle of the discussion. So, someone's talked about an idea and you have things to say about it. So, you might ask some questions. So, you could just sort of check that you understand the idea. You'd say something like 'are you thinking we would...?' and then sort of say what you are imagining, or you could suggest something: 'what if we do this?' and it's good to be enthusiastic about someone's idea and then build on it, I think.

Yes. But also we need to think about the holes or the problems because, well, you're helping someone fix them. So it could be, 'Have you thought about this or how will we deal with this?' And then there's a technique we use. We say, oh 'I'm just going to play devil's advocate'. And that means even if you support an idea, you pretend you oppose it and then try to find the problems with it.

Yeah. Another way we can phrase is to talk about stress testing an idea. And that means basically, um, seeing whether an idea will work in practice, will it stand up to lots of different problems and tests?

You can also say that you might want to look at something with different hats on, to try and see how it might look to people doing different roles.

So for example, you might say, 'I like this idea, but with my marketing hat on, I'm worried about how we would promote it.'

Sometimes when you've been discussing an idea, there might be things that you didn't think of or you didn't feel you could say in the meeting, so you might want to speak to someone afterwards. You might say, oh, 'just to follow up on your idea', or 'I've been thinking about your idea' or 'something occurred to me'.

Yeah, those are all really nice ways to show that you've been thinking about what someone said and then just add to it, carry on the conversation. OK, we've talked about sharing and developing ideas, but once a decision has been made, how do we make sure that an idea actually happens?

Yes. I mean, one of the things that you need to map out, you'll think about, are the timelines. Is there a deadline that something needs to be done by? Are there some things that depend on other things, other things that need to happen first? So you probably want to plan out your timeline. What needs to be done by when and when are you going to check in on things?

Another piece of jargon that you might hear at this point in this, at this point in the discussion is deliverables. So the deliverables are the results of, of what you're going to do, what you're going to make. So for example, um, it might be a presentation or it might be a product or it might be a whole campaign. So you might ask 'what are the deliverables?' And that's just agreeing what this idea is going to become in reality.

Often at this point, um, you'll decide who's responsible for certain things. And there may be one person who's responsible overall for making sure that something happens. And you say they take ownership of it or you give ownership of the project to someone. Um, you can also say if you're talking about a department or a team, you can say, 'I think this project will sit within the marketing team' or the finance team, so we can use that expression, sit within. It just means they're the people who are in charge of it.

Mhm. Yeah. And you also probably want to talk about what is going to happen immediately now. Um so here we could talk about action points. What are the things we're going to do from this discussion right now to make sure that we start this project? And we could also talk about next steps. Um, so the next things we're going to do. Um, so often teams might say, oh, 'we'll check in on this in a week's time', and there'll be a list of action points that different people have got to do to make sure that things progress, because you can talk and talk and talk about ideas, but unless people do something about it, it's probably not going to happen.

And that's it for this episode of Office English. You can find more programmes to

Next time we'll be talking about making suggestions at work without sounding rude.

Bye for now.

Bye.