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.

The truth is 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 myself 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, 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 that it could backfire.

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 person can’t hold all the context or spot all the risks. We need other people thinking too.

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.

We spend a lot of time trying to create the conditions in which people will give their best. But ultimately, people decide how much of themselves they’re prepared to give.

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 norm takes trust, and trust takes time.

People need to know they can bring thinking that isn’t finished — or, as I prefer, half-arsed ideas — without being made to regret it. They need to know honesty won’t be stored and used against them later. And they need enough faith in the direction to invest properly, rather than holding something back for the next strategy change. Because it will come.

Without that, people are more selective about what they give you. They speak, but cautiously. They contribute, but not fully. They save some of their best thinking for work they believe will survive.

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’re getting a handle on things. Of course we should collect 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 person who used to have an opinion about everything suddenly not having one.

What to do about it

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

Start by noticing whose thinking isn’t making it into the room. Who has stopped volunteering? Whose effort got lost when the priorities changed?

Then do something about it. Follow up when you said you would. Explain why a project got shelved instead of just moving on. Say when someone’s idea is better than yours. Acknowledge the thinking, not just the outcome.

Most of these things take thirty seconds.

The best ideas in the room aren’t always the ones you hear. Sometimes they’re the risks people have decided aren’t worth taking.