Are You Getting to the Best Ideas in the Room?

On psychological safety, energetic safety, and what complex work demands of leaders.

The work is too complex now for one person to hold all of it. You need the person who spots an integration issue three weeks before launch. You need people who are thinking differently and who connect dots you can’t even see. Most leaders know this. Most leaders talk about it.

But we don’t talk about enough is the reality that the people you need, decide how much of that thinking they will give you, and they decide it based on what happened the last time they shared it.

Years ago, I asked someone on my team to work on a project as part of a strategic initiative.  She spent weeks on it. Then the priorities shifted, the way they do, I got stupidly busy and I never went back to it. I didn’t tank them, I didn’t explain why their work got shelved. I moved on to the next important thing on the new plan.

They never mentioned it but they stopped putting their hand up and they got quieter in meetings, and within the year they were gone. The exit paperwork recorded “career progression” as their reason for leaving.

I thought that at that time that I ran a team where people could speak up.  They could have told me the project was frustrating, but that wasn’t enough. Some of them had stopped believing that their efforts mattered.

Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety changed how people in organisations think about speaking up, creating environments where people can voice concerns without fear of punishment and we really needed that.

But speaking up is just part of what we need.

Energetic safety asks a different question. Not “is it safe to say this?” but “is it worth giving to this?” Is it safe to invest my full energy, my focus, my creativity and my best thinking here? Will it matter? Or will it be overlooked, or dismissed, or worse, filed away and used against me later?

I’ve seen teams where everyone feels safe to voice concerns in meetings, but people don’t put their hand up for the hard projects anymore. They’ll tell you what’s wrong, but they won’t volunteer their effort or thinking to fix it. They’ve learned that speaking up is ok, but going above and beyond doesn’t matter, or worse that it backfires.

That’s psychological safety without energetic safety.

Distributed Intelligence

Decades ago, someone I had a lot of respect for told me, with total conviction: “knowledge is power.” He wasn’t wrong. But back then the work had boundaries and the pace was slower. Being the person with the answers who could make quick decisions was a genuine advantage, and it was what got you promoted.

That advantage has become a constraint. One single person can’t hold all the context, spot all of the risks or see all the opportunities. We need distributed intelligence; people offering innovative solutions before problems become crises.

This isn’t about being inclusive for the optics or creating a pleasant workplace. And it isn’t an argument for consensus – someone still has to decide and decide quickly. It’s that now, the raw material for that decision sits in other people’s heads, and they get to choose whether you see it.

Leadership frameworks can miss this piece of the puzzle. They assume that if you get the structure and incentives right and spell out the competencies needed, commitment naturally follows. It doesn’t because humans are messier than that. With the best intentions we try to get a handle on it.  We try to map the things that make a culture healthy and high performing on a spreadsheet and try to build trust through a twenty-point framework. But those are indicators of a culture, they are not the culture itself.

What it looks like when it’s working

In a team with energetic safety, people don’t just comply or execute, they think. They get stuck into the hard problems, and they bring half-formed ideas because they know messy thinking is an acceptable (and encouraged) part of the process. They push back because want to get it right, not just get it finished.

It looks like a junior manager feeling safe enough to interrupt a planning meeting to say “wait, I think we’re solving the wrong problem here” and then wanting the job of working out the better solution, because she trusts her thinking, her energy and her focus matter.

How its built

Building cultures where distributed intelligence is the normal way takes trust and trust takes time.

Trust that it’s safe to bring thinking that isn’t finished (or, as I prefer, ‘half-arsed ideas’). Trust that honesty, given and received, won’t be stored and used against you later. And trust in the direction itself, enough trust to fully invest rather than hold something back for when the strategy changes again. Because it will.

Not just two of them, but all three.

If you overlook one you get a team that speaks up but doesn’t invest, or invests but won’t challenge. Or does both, but only on the work they think will survive the next reorganisation. You end up with people giving you seventy percent, because that’s all they feel it’s safe to give.

Complex work needs the other thirty.

How it drains away

I’ve seen it disappear from high performing teams slowly.  It usually happens in the small moments, usually the ones we’re too busy to notice we’re creating.

It happens when the strategy changes every quarter and people decide they can’t afford to go all-in. It happens when someone gets labelled “difficult” for pushing back on a decision they genuinely wanted to get right. Caring can start to feel dangerous.

And it happens when we try to measure our way through it (because measuring feels like we are getting a handle on things). Of course we should be collecting useful data, but I’ve been in rooms where the dashboard was the only truth that counted. The signals that matter don’t usually show up there and if they do they show up too late:  someone’s hesitation in a meeting; the questions that have stopped being asked; the energy going out of a team three months before the resignations land. We give these shadows names ‘engagement scores’, ‘innovation metrics’, ‘culture surveys’, and by the time one of them tells you there’s a problem, the trust, the energy and the distributed intelligence have left the building.

The pattern is always the same. People work out what’s safe to bring, and then they adjust their energy, their focus, their commitment.

What to do about it

The good news is that none of this needs a leadership overhaul.

It needs noticing. Noticing whose thinking isn’t making it into the room. Becoming aware when effort gets ignored because the priority shifted, again. Tuning in to when someone talented stops volunteering and then asking yourself, honestly, what caused the shift in their behaviour.

Then seemingly small, human actions in response: following up when you said you would; explaining why a project got shelved instead of just moving on; saying out loud when someone’s idea is better than yours; acknowledging the thinking, not just the outcome.

These aren’t programmes or a new set of leadership competencies or even a values refresh. They’re human actions, about thirty seconds each.

I don’t know what would have happened if I’d noticed more, if I’d gone back to that person and told them the truth: that the project was dead, that it wasn’t their fault, that I’d read every word of it, that I appreciated their effort, that their thinking was sound, that their ideas were excellent. Possibly nothing, or maybe they’d have stayed. What I do know is that it would have cost me a ten-minute conversation, and not having it cost me the best thinking of someone I hired precisely for their thinking.