# How Innovation Happens — Lesson #3: Never Let a Committee Touch a New Idea
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I've been covering the link between future trends and innovation strategies for 30+ years. I went back through my blog posts, stretching to 2002, to dig out the nuggets of innovation insight I've discovered along the way. This series revisits those stories, tests what still holds up, and turns them into practical lessons for what comes next. "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. Action Items: Look at the last new idea that went to a "committee" or "working group" in your organization. Is it still alive? Be honest. The next promising idea that surfaces, assign it to one accountable owner and a hard 2-week decision deadline. No committee, no exceptions. If a committee is unavoidable, cap it at three people and give it a mandate to decide, not to study. Explore the full How Innovation Happens series.

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/10/how-innovation-happens-lesson-003/