Years ago, I heard the saying “You’re never a prophet in your own land.” That saying has stuck with me since then. I use it all the time.
Doing some quick searching, I discovered this saying is a derivation of various biblical passages. The most commonly attributed one seems to be Luke 4:24.
Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown.
Since I heard the saying I have always used it to describe a behavior I’ve frequently observed within teams and organizations. The moment when a team member proposes a solution to a problem, proposes a strategy, or perhaps proposes a framework to be used only to then be asked to validate their idea against an outside source. In the best cases, the validation might be by way of another person at the organization. But the worst version is when those ideas are actively ignored only for them to be adopted after an outside source proposes them as new.
Idea Equity
How I’ve framed this effect is to use a concept similar to brand equity or the other famous poker term “table image.” In product terms, brand equity represents the power a brand has in the minds of your customers. It’s constantly increasing and decreasing as it is affected by numerous external forces. In poker, “Table Image” is the term used to describe how you play the game. More precisely, it’s not how you play the game, it’s how others perceive you play. You are free to change your image to best defeat your opponents.
Likewise, within an organization, you are constantly engaged in an brand equity market. Your personal brand may have a linear or cyclical lifecycle which, I believe, begins the day of your first interview. But as a knowledge worker, if we look a little deeper under this visible “brand,” the product that really matters in an organization are your ideas.
And it’s these ideas that are constantly increasing or decreasing in relative value to your peers, your leaders, and your team members. There is a complex cocktail of reasons why this happens. Start with the easy one - bias. Enough research has been done to have basic understanding of how the biases of others will affect your direct ability to introduce and activate an idea.
But then I think there are at least three other dimensions at play.
Time Decay
The first one is time. As you enter a new organization, people have certain expectations of you framed heavily on the reasons you were hired. Your ideas. At first, the ideas you propose are new, innovative, and as though brought from a foreign land. They are exotic and interesting. Really, this is just the honeymoon phase.
But then as time goes on, your ideas start to seem familiar to the organization. You begin to lose control of your table image as team members identify your style of play. And eventually, your idea equity reaches parity with the rest of the team. Shall we call this the eating carry-out in front of the TV phase?
Loss Aversion
There is this uneasy feeling that if we make an internal decision based on internal ideas, we lose out on consulting external sources for validation. That opportunity cost appears to be so high, that organizations will at the very least seek out best practices on the internet - which many have argued are a terrible approach to fostering innovation. Worse yet, teams will spend thousands of dollars on paid consultants to give them that idea insurance policy they so desperately need.
The result of this irrational fear is to shut down internal innovation and collaboration. If teams consistently observe leaders in the organization second guessing their ideas with external validators, then the default will be to just call in the consultants on day 1. Everyone’s idea equity falls to the floor as does their morale and passion for the work.
Organizational Structure
The way we structure ourselves within an organization has a profound effect on an individual’s ability to affect their idea equity. Worse still, the way we visually depict our organization structure reinforces these beliefs. This is an area I’ll write about later on, but for today, I believe the simple top to bottom traditional organizational chart has a very powerful psychological effect on how we self value our own ideas in relation to others on that diagram. When our work culture uses this organizational chart as a proxy map of relative brand and idea equity, it undoubtedly must have a dampening effect on each person’s ability to activate their ideas within that structure.
Ideas Aren’t Commodities
In part 2, I’ll explore some ideas on how to improve our abilities to indeed be “prophets in our own lands.” I’ll propose some different approaches to our organizational chart, some ideas on using tools to objectively lead us to a decision to seek outside help, how to actively manage your brand and idea equity, and how to push back against leadership that insists on always seeking idea insurance from consultants.
The first step is to remember that one of the most valuable contributions team members make within an organization are their ideas. Each one is new to them, and likely new (even if slightly) to the organization. They aren’t undifferentiated commodities in a market place and should always be treated as high value contributions.