Collecting and Implementing Ideas from the Team: The Path of an Idea

Why ideas often do not get through in a company

Ask owners whether their team contributes ideas and you often hear: too few. Ask the employees and you hear something different. They have ideas, but they have experienced a suggestion in a meeting going unanswered, a proposal being taken as criticism, or someone saying we have always done it this way. The ideas are not gone. They stay in the coffee kitchen.

The article on continuous improvement on a small scale describes how small suggestions are decided and implemented every week. This guide starts a step earlier and reaches further. It asks: How does a small company get its team to voice ideas, and how does every idea, small or large, become a decision? To answer it, we clarify the terms, introduce a thinking model from research on voice and silence, review the findings, weigh two ways of collecting, and describe a five-stage idea path.

A team rarely stays silent because nothing occurs to it, but because it has learned what happens to ideas.

Terms: idea, suggestion, voice, and silence

An idea here is any suggestion from an employee on how the company could do something better, from the missing field in a form to a new service. An improvement suggestion is a concrete idea from an employee on how a process at their workplace can become simpler, faster, or less error-prone. Idea management is the defined path by which ideas are collected, evaluated, decided, and answered.

Research calls voicing such ideas voice: the voluntary expression of suggestions, concerns, or objections with the aim of improving something. Its counterpart is silence: deliberately withholding ideas and concerns even though one has something to say. Silence is therefore not a lack of ideas but a decision.

The thinking model: two silent check questions before every idea

Elizabeth Morrison (2014) summarized the research on voice and silence. According to her review, before speaking up an employee asks two questions, usually without noticing. The first concerns efficacy: will my idea achieve anything, is someone listening, can they change anything? The second concerns safety: what do I risk if I say it, will I be seen as a complainer, will I annoy someone? Only when both answers are favorable do they speak.

The second question is closely linked to what Amy Edmondson calls psychological safety, the belief that one can raise mistakes without negative consequences. The article on learning from bad decisions describes her findings. The same applies to ideas as to mistakes: whoever makes a suggestion always criticizes the current state a little, and often someone who set it up.

An everyday image makes the mechanism tangible. Whoever has waited in vain at a counter twice does not queue a third time, even if the counter is now staffed. They have learned that it is pointless. A team learns from unanswered suggestions in exactly the same way, and this learning lasts longer than any request to please contribute ideas.

What studies show about openness and feedback

Detert and Burris (2007) studied in a restaurant chain with 3,149 employees and 223 managers which supervisor behavior is related to improvement suggestions. They compared an inspiring, transformational leadership style with plain openness, the willingness to listen, to examine suggestions seriously, and to respond to them. Openness was more consistently related to suggestions. The relationship ran through psychological safety. And supervisors’ behavior had the strongest effect on the best-performing employees, the very people whose ideas are especially valuable.

How the response to one idea shapes the next was studied by Lehmann, Beretta, Dao, and Ebersberger (2025). In a first study, they analyzed 1,143 ideas submitted by shop-floor employees of an automotive company over five years. In a second study, they tested the effect of different kinds of feedback in an online experiment. Praise for an implemented idea and a factual, understandable reason for a rejected idea improved the prospects of the next idea. Remarks about the person, such as a friendly “please keep it up” without a reason, hardly helped and could even be understood as doubt about one’s own ability. Reasons that were hard to understand weakened the positive effect. For the timing of feedback, by contrast, the authors found no measurable influence.

The findings fit the studies described in the article on continuous improvement: suggestions work where they are implemented and answered. The limits are the usual ones. Both studies concern large companies, and the restaurant chain data are based on surveys. For a company with twenty employees, they show what matters, not how strong the effect is there.

Open box or targeted question? Two perspectives

The first view says: ideas come when they want to. A company therefore needs an open channel that is reachable at any time, whether a box, a list, or a form. Every restriction deters, and the best ideas often concern things nobody would have asked about.

The second view says: open channels fill up with wishes, complaints, and things that do not fit the core, and in the end nobody is responsible for handling them. Better is a targeted question: the owner names a concrete problem, such as the many queries on orders, and asks for ideas on it for a limited period. This focuses attention and makes evaluation easier.

I consider a combination sensible, with a clear emphasis. The open channel stays so that the unexpected has a path. But most of the energy goes to two or three targeted questions a year, on problems the company actually wants to solve. This answers the efficacy question in advance: whoever responds to a question that was asked knows that someone wants the answer. Good questions for this can be found on a waste walk, as described in the article on lean in the office.

The idea path in five stages

For every idea to receive an answer, it needs a fixed path. It is called the idea path here and has five stages. The most important distinction is made in the third: small ideas go through the weekly improvement suggestion, large ones through a decision paper.

1. Collect

   Ideas come through an open channel, such as a shared list, and through targeted questions. Each idea is recorded with date, name, and one sentence about the problem, not just the solution.

2. Screen

   Once a week, a designated person reviews all new ideas. Each receives an acknowledgment with the next step within one week.

3. Classify

   Small ideas that can be implemented in a day go into the weekly suggestion. Large ideas with costs, several people involved, or consequences for customers are worked up into a decision paper, together with the person who had them.

4. Decide

   Every idea receives one of three answers: yes, try it out until a set date, or no with a reason. Postponing without a date does not exist.

5. Respond

   The answer goes to the person who had the idea, with the reason in two or three understandable sentences. Implemented ideas are visible on a list.

For large ideas, the decision paper is the right format. The guide to the one-page decision paper describes its structure. It matters that the person the idea came from helps work out the paper. That takes work off the owner and shows that the idea is taken seriously.

What a good answer to an idea looks like

The study by Lehmann and colleagues suggests that the reason for a rejection has more effect than any form of praise. That is inconvenient, because a no with a reason takes more work than a friendly thank-you. But it is exactly the answer that addresses the first check question: here my idea is examined, and I learn how the next one can succeed.

Something simple follows for the owner’s role. Openness shows not in the invitation to contribute ideas but in the reaction to the first uncomfortable one. Whoever asks questions before judging, as the article on the owner as coach describes, answers the safety question. And whoever briefly brings up every idea in the next weekly planning meeting answers the efficacy question.

Conclusion: how does a company collect and implement ideas?

The opening question was
a small company gets its team to voice ideas and how every idea becomes a decision. Morrison’s model sets the direction: employees speak up when they believe it will achieve something and will not hurt them. The studies show that plain openness on the part of supervisors does more than an inspiring style, and that justified answers make the next ideas better.

In practice, this means: an open channel and a few targeted questions a year, an idea path with five stages, the separation of small ideas for the weekly suggestion and large ones for the decision paper, and for every idea an answer with a reason. The sober observation is: a company does not get as many ideas as its employees have, but as many as it answers.

The next step

• Create a shared idea list with the columns date, name, problem, idea, answer, status.
• Designate one person who screens and acknowledges new ideas every week.
• Formulate a targeted question about a problem you really want to solve and put it to the team for four weeks.
• Answer all open ideas from recent months, including the rejected ones, with a reason in two sentences.
• After one month, check how many ideas received an acknowledgment within a week.