Never Let a Committee Touch a New Idea

“Form a Committee. An absolute surefire way of shutting down ideas!”

I’ve watched this pattern for over twenty years, across some of the biggest companies in the world: a great idea surfaces, someone gets excited about it, and then someone else says, “Let’s put together a committee to look into it.” That’s the moment the idea dies. Not with a rejection, but with a slow, quiet suffocation.

Committees don’t kill ideas on purpose. They kill them structurally. Herd mentality takes over. Decisions get deferred because deferring feels safer than deciding. Uncertainty becomes a virtue and indecision becomes an asset. By the time the committee reports back, the market’s moved on, or the original spark has been diluted into something nobody’s excited about anymore, including the person who thought of it.

The organizations that actually innovate treat a new idea completely differently: fast, small-group ownership, a real deadline, and someone senior enough to protect it from the herd.

If committees are where ideas go to slow down, the answer is to redesign how decisions get made. Here are three places to start.