An Elegant Puzzle

You’d expect that novel ideas would be heavily valued in these circumstances, but, interestingly, it’s the opposite: execution is the primary currency in the growth plates. That’s because you typically have a surplus of fairly obvious ideas to try, and there is constrained bandwidth for evaluating those ideas. It’s common for well-meaning individuals from outside the growth plates to jump in to help by supplying more ideas, but that’s counterproductive. What folks in the growth plates need is help reducing and executing the existing backlog of ideas, not adding more ideas that must be evaluated. Teams in these scenarios are missing the concrete resources necessary to execute, and supplying those resources is the only way to help. Giving more ideas feels helpful, but isn’t. Finally, I think it’s important to recognize that, in the growth plates, you are focused on surviving to the next round, which might be a different growth challenge, or might be the team stabilizing. It is extremely hard to consistently do the basics well in these circumstances, because you simply won’t have enough time to do them well. You’ll have to get comfortable doing as well as time constraints allow, and sometimes that will lead to being mediocre at things you’re passionate about.