Hey there 👋, I’m Bryan
Welcome to my newsletter. I share practical advice and tackle tough questions on putting AI to work inside your business. Thank you for being here. Send me your questions and in return I’ll humbly offer actionable real-talk advice 🤜🤛
Every company I’ve worked with has a Donna. Donna sits in the back office. She’s been there for 25 years, and she understands every nuance of how the place actually runs. When something breaks, nobody opens up a ticket, they simply ask Donna. She knows what works, what’s broken, what the team quietly wastes hours on, and which scary-looking problems are actually nothing.
Donna loves her job. She’s also recently started talking about retirement and spending more time with her new grandbaby.
That combination should worry you more than any AI headline. Donna has ideas, 25 years of them, about exactly where AI could help your business. Most companies have no way to capture a single one before it walks right out the door.
Ideas are cheap, except these
Let’s be real: ideas are not valuable. Everyone has them, and people give them away for free all the time because the value lives in the focus and the follow-through, not the idea itself. Elon was not the first person to think of putting humans on Mars. He is, however, the first person to spend two decades deliberately organized around getting there. If I handed you my billion dollar idea for reusable rockets tomorrow, I’d have handed you nothing.
There is one exception, and it’s the whole point of this article. Ideas about applying new technology inside the walls of your business, coming from the people who know it best, are valuable on arrival. Donna’s idea about the invoice matching process she has run and evolved since 2001 is worth more than any consultant’s slide because she is the only one who knows where it actually hurts.
I guarantee these people are in your organization, which raises the obvious question: how do you find them?
Finding your Donna is less like sending out smoke signals and more like putting your ear to the ground, and if you listen carefully, you’ll hear them. Don’t immediately assume you’ll hear your senior managers. Titles here don’t matter at all. You’re listening for your curious people. They ask questions, have deep expertise, and genuinely care for their corner of the business. There’s even a good chance this person finds you before you find them. They make themselves known the moment a change is proposed that touches their space, and they’re not afraid to tell you why it won’t work. Be careful though. It’s easy to rapidly misdiagnose this as resistance, however it’s actually years of knowledge at work. This person knows every mechanic of why it works today and precisely what will break it tomorrow.
Start listening, publicly and on purpose. Your curious people will surface. Either they’ll bring the ideas, or they’ll have loud opinions about everyone else’s. Both are gold.
How to build the intake
Stand up a form that never closes. A basic Microsoft or Google form is enough to get started. Do not run a one-time survey, or a quarterly one. Inspiration does not follow a schedule. Keep the form open every day of the year.
Make it fast. If the form takes more than five minutes, people will skip it. Ask only for what you need to evaluate the idea and follow up. Save the full business case for a later conversation.
Put a name on every idea. Do not make the form anonymous. Share anonymized versions with the wider team if you like, but someone must know who submitted each idea, or nothing can happen next.
Give the intake one owner. One person owns the form data and the process behind it. If the intake has no owner, it is a suggestion box. Suggestion boxes are where ideas go to die.
Close the loop, every time. Confirm receipt of every idea within a day or two. Tell people what happens to ideas after they submit. Post regular updates on what’s moving. If you pass on an idea, tell the submitter why. This step is where most intakes fail.
What to ask on the form
Enough to size and route the idea, no more:
What is the problem, and who has it today?
What is the impact of the problem?
What solution are you envisioning?
What is the benefit of this solution?
Which systems, processes, and people are involved?
Are any vendors or 3rd parties involved?
What does it depend on?
Would you be willing to pilot it yourself?
That last question matters. A submitter who wants to pilot their own idea is telling you something about ownership that no other field on a form can.
The part that’s actually about people
The form is the boring part. When you run this well, you’re showing your team that they have real influence over the direction of the company. People identify with their ideas, personally. I’m not saying that’s right, but it’s reality, and it means rejection of an idea can land like rejection of the person. Handle both with care.
Done right, you get teams that are happier, more engaged, and more committed to the work, because the work is theirs. Done poorly, you become an idea black hole, and a black hole is worse than never asking at all.
Whether managers collect their teams’ ideas and pass the best ones upward, or you pulse the whole org from the top down, is your call. In my experience people respond best when they feel they have direct access to the top.
One warning from the trenches. With automation on everyone’s mind, people are eager to show their value, and in a toxic culture I’ve watched managers cherry-pick their team’s best ideas and pass them off as their own. It fails twice: the idea alone was never the valuable part, and the theft kills every downstream benefit of listening in the first place. This is a symptom of insecure leadership, and middle-management is most susceptible to it. Don’t allow this to happen.
Does every idea really need to go through the form?
This is a fair question. In general you want teams enabled and autonomous, doing things without asking permission, but the reality with AI is that it’s moving incredibly fast, and we’re all learning this together. So to get started, don’t make anybody jump through hoops. Everyone thinks about AI differently, too and so I’d be cautious to provide “example ideas” of what you’re looking for as this can stifle the creativity of what’s already out there. Keep it open, let it happy organically, and see what you’re getting before you add guardrails or restrictions. You can tweak the intake along the way as your organization matures.
Collecting the ideas in one place pays for itself quickly. You’re going to start to find where there is shadow AI, and things happening where they maybe shouldn’t be. Because the form is not anonymous, you’re going to get a sense of who your biggest champions for AI are. If Susie submits 10 ideas, that tells you something. Whether you have a specific department of people thinking about this, or an entire department that’s completely disengaged, that tells you something, too. The message you send by running an intake well is simple: your ideas are heard, valued, and we want more of them.
One more thing, on silly ideas. Yes, they exist, but given the nature of AI what’s silly today might not be silly tomorrow, and vice versa. That is already happening, so don’t write anything off.
If you don’t have an intake today, this is the starting point. You’re starting the adventure of gathering data: what your team thinks about AI, their willingness to share ideas, their willingness to own them, and what they think can and can’t be automated. That is a lot to take action on, and it’s just the beginning.
Something actionable you can do today 👣
Think of the last idea someone on your team pitched you in passing, and recall what happened to it. Did it fall on deaf ears? Did it go into a suggestion box? Did it get shared around? Did it get implemented? What’s the state of that idea?
Now go tell that person today what happened to it. If the answer is nothing, say that too, and say why. This is the entire muscle this article is asking you to build.
You’ll get two things out of this. From your own retrospection, an honest sense of how you truly handle your team’s ideas, and from your teammate, a sense of how they feel about sharing them. If you want to go further, ask the follow-up: do you feel like when you share ideas, they are taken seriously?
Key Takeaways 🥡🥢
Your team’s ideas are the exception to “ideas are cheap.” Ideas about applying AI inside your business, from the people who know it best, are valuable the moment they’re written down.
Build the intake like a standing promise. Always open, under five minutes, never anonymous, owned by one person. Close the loop on every idea, including the ones that don’t move forward.
Treat the idea like the person. People identify with what they submit. Answer every idea with care and you get engaged teams doing work they consider theirs. Ignore them and you’ve built an idea black hole.
In Summary
Remember Donna, and the grandkids she keeps mentioning. She’s going to walk out the door with 25 years of ideas whether or not you build a place to catch them. Open the intake, keep it open, and answer everything that comes in. The ideas themselves are just the start of the conversation, and honestly, the conversation is the point. Your Donna’s are out there. Ask them before they go.
Thanks for reading!
Sincerely,
Bryan 👋
PS - Let me know in the comments if you found this newsletter helpful. Your feedback would mean the world to me 🙏
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