Do you censor your ideas?

Tom Barrett
2 min readMar 5, 2023

Next time you’re afraid to share ideas, remember someone once said in a meeting let’s make a film with a tornado full of sharks.

I laughed about this advice this week, automatically getting a promotion into my future talks and presentations on creativity and innovation!

Tom x Midjourney

Self-censorship is the silent killer of ideas. Even before they get thrown into the creative deathmatch environment, we all too often experience. It is a surprise anything changes!

Education organisations like schools rely on the creative capacity of their workforce. We laud innovation like any other industry, but the intentional design of the conditions for innovation is often missing.

Internal idea filtering starts in the small ways we perceive a threat and our experiences of socialising new ideas for lessons, programmes or projects. Yes, it comes back to the feedback dynamic we often explore in this newsletter.

You might say self-censorship indirectly results from poorly designed feedback experiences — a second-order effect of poor communication.

Whenever I am talking to people about when new ideas spring up, they say the shower, driving, or washing the dishes. The process of generating ideas unconsciously with intuition

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Tom Barrett
Tom Barrett

Written by Tom Barrett

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