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In intense, creative pursuits, one bad habit is as easy to adopt as it is fatal: spending too much time on bad ideas. That’s why most high-risk operations have developed ways to quickly and honestly critique and toss out the projects that are going nowhere. In politics, they call it the situation room. In Hollywood, it’s the writers’ room. In art school, it’s the crit.
Innovation is a similarly high-risk pursuit–the future of the business can depend on it. Yet only the world’s top organizations seem to take weeding out bad ideas seriously. At these companies, it all starts with a single room.
I first caught wind of “the room” a few years ago after meeting with an early Nest employee who knew founder Tony Fadell. Before Nest, Fadell had worked closely with Steve Jobs at Apple designing the iPod. Fadell realized that Jobs’s notorious four-hour review sessions, where he would ruthlessly tear apart bad ideas, were a key to the company’s famous ability to innovate.
At Nest, Fadell wanted to make sure that power didn’t just live in one individual. So he built a special innovation room just a few doors down from his office. It looked unlike any innovation space you’ve ever seen. There were no Legos, no gadgets, not even glass doors or windows. The sparse decor helped occupants understand that the room wasn’t a place to play. It had one purpose: to kill bad ideas. The room came with its own set of rules. It didn’t matter from whom an idea came–a top executive or an entry-level employee-or how much had already been spent on it, be it $5 or $500,000. In the room, everyone was given explicit permission to evaluate ideas openly and honestly.