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Why Your First Idea Is Rarely Your Best Idea at Work
Description
Lucas and Luna explore the 'serial position effect' and how the order in which you present ideas in meetings shapes how colleagues perceive them. Drawing on a 2024 study from Carnegie Mellon, they explain why the first idea you blurt out often gets penalized, while ideas presented third or fourth in a sequence get a memory and credibility boost. They offer a practical rule—never speak first in a brainstorm unless you have to—and discuss how to reposition your best idea by deliberately slotting it later in the conversation. Lucas shares a real case from a product team at a midsize SaaS company where shifting a proposal from slot 1 to slot 3 doubled its adoption rate. Luna pushes back on whether the effect works in written async feedback, and they land on a counterintuitive takeaway: if you want your idea to stick, let someone else say something similar first.