Are you chasing the idea squirrel?

Your strategy deserves more than a dopamine hit.

THINK ON IT: Are you chasing the idea squirrel? 

My wife would tell you that one of the most frequent phrases she hears from me is, “I’ve got an idea!”

You might say I’m kinda fond of them. You should be too.

Without fresh ideas, innovation dries up. Your business becomes stagnant. Even your personal life gets dull. Ideas are the raw material of progress. Every leader—especially those with ambitions to grow, transform, or reinvent—needs to keep their idea factory humming.

But once the factory is running, what happens to the ideas that come your way?

That’s where many leaders, particularly the visionary kind, get into trouble.

Some of us have a hard time not chasing every idea that darts across our path, the way a dog might chase a squirrel. We feel the pull of possibility. The rush of something new. Even the smallest idea can look like the spark that could change everything. It’s not just optimism. There’s chemistry at play. Ideas release dopamine—that feel-good neurotransmitter that convinces us we’re making progress even when we might just be spinning our wheels.

Before long, we’ve invested time, attention, and energy chasing a trail of ideas that lead nowhere in particular. The work that matters most—the core strategic objectives we’ve committed to—gets neglected.

It’s easy to fall into this trap.

The allure of ideas is not a weakness. It’s an occupational hazard for growth-minded leaders. And once you’ve learned that lesson the hard way—after exhausting yourself and your team—you might be tempted to swing to the opposite extreme.

That’s the nuclear option: shutting down the idea factory altogether. “I must focus,” you tell yourself. “I can’t afford to entertain new ideas.”

You’ve just blown up your idea factory, and possibly the future of your business with it.

Cutting off the flow of ideas is dangerous. Yes, you’ll solve the problem of distraction. But you’ll also undermine the stuff that fuels innovation. Without a steady supply of new ideas, you risk stagnation. And that can eventually lead to something worse: irrelevance.

Ideas are not the problem. The unbridled pursuit of them is.

Strategic leaders don’t chase every idea, nor do they suppress them. Instead, they steward them, nurturing those that have merit and incubating the rest.

Your strategy deserves more than a dopamine hit or a decimated idea factory.

It deserves an idea incubator—a place free of a snap judgment of “good idea” or “bad idea” or any demands for immediate action.

Do you have an incubation strategy for all the ideas you generate? If not, read on. As a premium member, I'll share with you some ways in which you can painlessly create an incubation process that keeps the squirrel chasing at bay. (Become a Premium Member. Paid subscribers get access to over 100 tools and how-tos on implementing strategic topics, including a 7-part series to help leaders build their own strategic capacity.)

"Although it is part of the creative’s essence to constantly generate new ideas, our addiction to new ideas is also what often cuts our journeys short." — Scott Belsky

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