If you only say yes or no to ideas, your team will keep coming back to you with a similar level of ideas. They won’t know why a strategic proposal worked or didn’t. If you want something to change, it’s your responsibility to invest the time to share your thought process, give feedback, and coach them on how to think differently.The end result of whether you move forward with an idea isn’t as important as the thought process behind it. The world champion poker player Annie Duke coined the decision-making principle of resulting, which describes this well:Resulting is the tendency to judge a decision based on its outcome rather than its quality. It's a natural human tendency to think that if a decision leads to a good outcome, it must have been a good decision. Likewise, if it leads to a bad outcome, it must have been a bad decision.

In this world, you rarely say no to an idea, because it's not about saying yes or no. It's about vetting an idea. You ask strategic questions, so your employee ends up realizing themselves that the idea won't work in its current iteration.You work collaboratively to pressure test assumptions. They excitedly go back to the drawing board and come back to you with a stronger iteration and next steps. They hone their judgment and become more strategic over time, requiring less support from you.You have less decision fatigue and get better results. Direct reports feel empowered and take ownership.

Any idea goes, but each team member should be prepared to advocate for their idea and defend it. You should be prepared to walk through the upside, downside, data points rooted in reality, and how it works given your assets and constraints. Anyone can ask questions and probe, and these questions are received with gratitude and openness.

Lazy thinking is assuming your idea simply works, or that someone else will be in charge of “figuring out the details.” Lazy thinkers consider anything they don’t want to do (usually the hard part of actually solving a problem) to be “the details.”