Before a habit of exploring is established, some employees will bring all their ideas to their manager. This may sound innocent, but it’s often an attempt to hand over a monkey. There are two typical situations:

The first one is when people bring ideas that they want other people to explore, often group-functions. Then they get disappointed when their idea is not used, and they complain how ideas are not well received ‘in this company’. You need to deal with this right away before the idea takes hold that exploring is hopeless. Giving monkeys to others is not exploring.

The second one is more innocent, but also tricky:

Imagine that Boris just came up with an idea that we ought to hand-write all our quotes to make them more personal. Since we send thousands of quotes every month, that would be a lot of work, but Boris believes that customers will love us for it and give us more orders with a higher gross margin. And now he has presented this idea to you, his manager, and hopes you will understand how smart it is. What should you do?

You could just say no. But if you want people to do more exploring, you should know that saying “no” to a couple of suggestions, or having a negative opinion, will be enough to stop any exploring in your team. Since you know about monkey management, you won’t say: “I’ll look into it and get back to you”, good for you. So, you say “Interesting!” to avoid having an opinion. Remember:

Evaluating an employee’s idea is a monkey that belongs to the employee. Your job as an exploring leader is to help the employee get better at exploring, not to do the exploring for them.

The exploring process questions (from the level-up-course) are helpful here. By inviting Boris to think about the next step, you help him make progress without taking over his monkey.

The opportunity 1) is to increase sales, the idea 2) is to hand-write quotes, so the next step is 3) “How can you test key factors of this idea in a simple, inexpensive way?”. And the person to answer this question is Boris. If you answer the question, you take over the monkey.

If you think he needs more help, you can ask him who he wants to involve. Also, you can advise him to come up with at least three ideas on how to do the test, and then pick the best one (not bring them to you). This will improve his idea-skills; most people stop thinking when they have their first idea.

Of course, it saves time to just say no – in the short run. But it’s a quick fix, it doesn’t prepare Boris to get any better at exploring. On the other hand, by leading him to the next step you hold him accountable, let him keep his monkey, and teach him the exploring process. Exploring leadership.

And there is another thing: an important part of learning to explore is to not get too discouraged when ideas don’t turn out to be as brilliant as they looked in the first enthusiastic moment. Many (maybe most) ideas end up in the bin for one reason or another: that’s the nature of exploring. If idea-givers find the faults themselves, it’s much less discouraging compared to if you tell them. And they learn more in the process.