What if we can’t recognise good ideas?
The Afterbefore Story and The Struggle to Recognize Innovation
Good ideas are everywhere because people are imaginative and clever. Success is more about how the idea gets out into the world than its innate quality. It is likely to be a bumpy journey. Check out this languid lament.
Have you ever had that sinking feeling when you try to explain a brilliant idea only to watch eyes glaze over across the room? You're not alone. After decades as an ecologist, researcher, and entrepreneur, I've discovered something unsettling: some ideas seem to fall flat with most audiences, no matter how well presented. But why?
What if the challenge isn't communication skills or choosing the right PowerPoint template? What if some ideas are beyond most people's grasp - not because they're too complex, but because we've lost our ability to recognise and evaluate new ideas in our distraction-filled world?
This matters because humanity faces unprecedented challenges that need fresh thinking and bold solutions. From climate change to food security, from soil degradation to biodiversity loss, we can't afford to miss good ideas simply because we've forgotten how to spot them. Whether you're a student preparing for a career in environmental science or someone concerned about leaving a better world for future generations, recognising and evaluating new ideas is essential.
In this issue, I'll share a personal story about an idea that could have transformed how we manage agricultural soil and why it failed to gain traction. More importantly, you'll discover how becoming a mindful sceptic can help you…
Cut through information overload to identify truly valuable ideas
Evaluate complex concepts with confidence and clarity
Avoid being swayed by flashy but empty innovations
Contribute meaningfully to discussions about our shared future
Let me tell you about when I tried to sell an idea to a room full of experts and what it taught me about why good ideas often go unrecognized...
Standard pitch fare
Suppose that you have a complex idea that you need to explain.
Let’s say it’s a paradigm shift in your discipline or a disruptive technology that will change everything.
Explaining this creativity is problematic because it means people have to think, suspend some disbelief, and even throw out some established truths that might have worked in the past.
It is unlikely that just rocking up and blurting out the idea will work. Some preparation is needed.
Here are a few things that might help:
Understand your idea.
Figure out the best way to communicate the essence of the idea, what benefits it brings and how it will change the lives of those it touches. This is not the time for the technical details; it is just a clear description of the benefits with a hint at the core concept.
Choose a communication tool—a chat over coffee, death by PowerPoint, a blog post, a few tweets, perhaps a book or even an old-fashioned television ad—whatever the best methods might be; you will need some communication channels.
Test your comms approach, practice it and hone it.
Get early feedback to see how many people will get the idea.
Market and sell the idea as if your life depended on it.
All good. This is standard pitch fare and familiar to anyone who has tried entrepreneurship.
Get this sequence right, and some people will understand your idea. Hopefully, they will give you feedback. A few will like it, and others will not.
Of course, there will be some who will not understand the concept at all.
This is to be expected. People are generally not good listeners, have way more important things to spend their bandwidth on than your idea, and were probably sexting their date during the PowerPoint slides.
Even so, they could pay attention during the summary or Q&A session and get most of your thoughts.
In professional circles, typically, your audience is highly educated, familiar with the broad topics, has some experience with the day-to-day aspects of the profession, and should have at least a peripheral interest in the idea, especially if you just told them it’s a game-changer.
They would pay some attention if only to let you know you are wrong—the proportion of ‘just don’t get it’ folk should be small.
As an ideas guy, this is roughly how I have operated my entire career. I have assumed that complex ideas can be communicated.
I learned to accept that not everyone will get it the first time around. However, most will understand the idea eventually, given enough exposure through well-executed and diverse communication skills.
Only what if this assumption is incorrect?
What if they will never recognise good ideas?
As a working professional, it never crossed my mind that people would not get it. That an idea, even a complex one, might be beyond people.
I knew that in any audience, a few would never understand, no matter how well the idea is presented. I accepted this inevitably. Only I thought the proportion was small enough not to worry about it.
Today's scary thought is that the proportion of ‘non comprendo’ is significant, perhaps a landslide majority.
I can’t contemplate such a possibility because my egoic assumption is that they will always get it so long as the messaging can be tailored to them. Sooner or later, the light bulb will go on.
Now, I am quaking as I question this assumption.
There may be some ideas that people will never understand. Some concepts that a few people get intuitively, but the majority don’t, no matter how good the communication or how many cool tools are used.
I’m labouring this to give it time to sink in.
Let me give you an example.
Predicting the future productivity of soil
A few years ago, I had an idea.
What if it were possible to use existing soil process models to evaluate soil productivity today and predict what might be possible in the future from what had gone on in the past?
Knowledge of how soils deliver nutrients to plants could be combined with how soils were managed in the past to predict future productivity. There were endless possibilities if it could be done.
Scientists have developed several reliable models of how soil nutrients and carbon move around and how these transfers change with climate, weather and land management. For example, suppose a farmer was rearing sheep on pasture. How many sheep and how often they grazed would affect the soil characteristics, and the models were becoming robust at estimating how.
But could sheep production be improved if the farmer changed his management practices, say from extensive grazing all the time to pulsed grazing with periods of resting the pastures?
The idea was to use the soil models to estimate the future soil conditions with the grazing as usual and the counterfactual of a change to pulsed grazing with rest.
Conceptually, it's not rocket science.
Counterfactuals are nothing new. They are the exploration of the ‘what if” hypothetical scenario or situation that runs contrary to actual events or facts. It involves imagining or considering what might have happened if circumstances or actions had been different to what occurred. They are commonly used in history, social sciences, and philosophy to explore the implications of various choices, events, or conditions in the present or future to help understand causality, evaluate decision-making processes, and analyse the potential outcomes of different actions or events.
In these disciplines, experiments are either impossible or morally dodgy, so a counterfactual becomes the next best thing for evidence generation.
What was a little different in my idea was to use the models to backcast from the present soil conditions to work backward from the current state and try to identify agricultural practices that would produce the current state both from land management records—what happened—and from what could have happened, a historical counterfactual.
There are two significant advantages to backcasting.
The first is that instead of knowing just the current soil conditions, there is an estimate of how it arrived, a trend.
The second is that backcasting with multiple counterfactual scenarios generated an estimate of variability, such as how much response in soil properties the models would predict, given that they were constrained by input variables, especially soil type and weather patterns.
It turned out that several models, including two of the most robust CENTURY and RothC, already did something similar to help calibrate their output. A few minor tweaks meant we could add the historical counterfactuals.
Estimating the trend that brought the soil to its current condition makes it easier to predict its future responses.
We called the idea ‘Afterbefore’, a play on the reality that for soil, what happens in the future is influenced by what happened in the past.
We plugged CENTURY into historical weather, used climate models to predict future weather, and generated a few examples for grazing lands. The output of the analysis is aboveground biomass, a measure of how much grass would be available to the sheep.
Here is one for a farm near Cooma in the southern highlands of NSW, where the farmer raises sheep on natural grasslands.
Grass production varies yearly, as you might expect in Australia's fickle climate and weather regimes—sometimes it rains, and in other years it might not.
The green line shows the backcasted historical production and the forecast for future production, assuming that in 2018, the farmer decides to rest his paddocks from sheep production. The grey line predicts what happens if the farmer continues with the management that went on before: business as usual.
The analysis predicts biomass will recover above the long-term average within a decade when the paddocks are rested from sheep grazing. Business as usual has the enterprise going bust. Changing practices allows the farmer to restore his soil and livestock productivity. He could return to good business.
What happens if I try to communicate this idea?
Maybe my idea spark goes something like this…
Suppose I take the big idea into a classroom of seven-year-olds. Thirty cheeky faces calm down and hear the idea. Three of them are smiling even more when you have finished. The rest are bored silly, having switched off at the word soil.
Take the idea into a year 12 classroom at the end of the school education system. The same happens—three adolescents are hanging off your every word, and the rest are looking at selfies.
Next, there are thirty neighbours I invite round for a barbecue. Three stop drinking their beers because they are so into what I’m saying. The rest are gossiping about last night’s episode of MAFS.
Try the same thing with thirty work colleagues. Only three have any idea what you are talking about.
Then comes the worrying part.
I present the great idea to thirty senior civil servants who are directors of departments and advisors to government ministers. Same again. Only three of them nod at me, and the rest are reading emails on their phones.
The kids, teenagers and your mates you expect to glaze over.
Senior professionals whose job is to understand and use evidence in making agricultural policy have few excuses for falling asleep.
In the past, I would have just put it down to a poor presentation and tried again. Maybe found a new delivery method under the assumption that if you keep at it, the naysayers and ignorant can be enlightened.
Now, I am not so sure.
Some ideas may be beyond such entrenched people. They will never get it.
In other words, it is not about me or the idea. It is what is possible in the heads of the receivers. And it may be much less than I realised.
People might say that an idea’s time will come. Maybe this is too early for your game changer, and there is truth in this because timing is essential. Ideas need a context and a place to take hold, but if there are some ideas, concepts and consequences that people will never understand, then we have a new problem.
How do we decide which of the many ideas can be understood?
As the human population booms and busts, we must answer this question soon.
A room full of mindful sceptics
Imagine what would have happened if I had taken the idea to a room full of mindful sceptics—30 quietly confident, engaged humans searching for the truth.
They are curious and critical.
They know about evidence and evaluation and will not suffer fools but will be kind.
I am on my toes. My eyes move across the room and make contact with almost everyone. Instead of three, the majority are paying attention, many of them through to the end of the presentation. All around the room, there is frantic scribbling on notepads.
When I ask for questions, a forest of hands appears. The queries come thick, fast and insightful. How do you know that the trends are real? What happens if you cannot get the historical information? How do you convince the farmer to change practices? Could you make a predictive map?
When the meeting closes, the people mill about having animated conversations, and three come up to me to offer their help in taking the idea forward. “It has merit’” they say.
Alright, I may be in fantasy land. Still, the arid intellectual deserts I experienced when peddling my idea in the real world were due to a lack of curiosity and critical thinking.
Being a mindful sceptic to recognise the good ideas
Are we so out of touch that we cannot take on anything more complex than a tweet or a cute cat picture?
Are we just too busy and so chaotic that we do not even have the brainpower to hear an idea?
I have experienced too many rooms with people lacking curiosity and critical thinking to be objective about this. Consistent lack of understanding and even the dearth of energy for consideration happened too often to believe it was a coincidence or a consequence of poor communication skills.
Was it ever thus? What do you think? Am I bonkers, or is there some truth in this?
If there is, what does it mean for how we communicate significant policy changes and creative ideas in the future?
I don’t want you to be someone who doesn’t get new ideas.
I don’t want you in the majority who don’t understand or miss great opportunities. I want you to see new ideas, evaluate them and determine how valuable they are so you can come up with even better ones.
Sign up for all our tips and tricks for being a mindful sceptic.
Mindful Momentum
The Reverse Pitch Exercise
Choose an idea you recently dismissed—perhaps a new environmental solution you read about or an impractical suggestion for community action.
Set aside 15 minutes (time it!) to prepare a compelling pitch for this idea as if you were its most prominent champion.
Your Pitch Structure:
1. The Problem: What real-world issue does this address?
2. The Solution: How does this idea tackle the problem?
3. The Evidence: What facts support this approach?
4. The Implementation: How could this work in practice?
5. The Benefits: Who wins and how?
You'll often experience an "aha moment" during this exercise when you suddenly see the value you missed in your initial reaction. Even if you disagree with the idea, you'll understand it more deeply and be better equipped to explain why.
Pro Tip…
Keep a "Reverse Pitch Journal" where you document these exercises. Over time, you'll develop a more nuanced approach to evaluating new ideas and might even discover some gems you nearly missed.
Key Points
This exploration of how people recognise and evaluate new ideas reveals a concerning pattern that regardless of audience sophistication, only a tiny fraction typically engage with complex concepts. Through real-world examples from classrooms to boardrooms, we see how potentially transformative ideas often fail to gain traction, not due to their complexity but because of fundamental limitations in how humans process novel concepts.
A detailed case study of "afterbefore," an innovative soil productivity prediction model, illustrates the challenges faced when introducing new ideas. Despite its strong scientific foundation and clear practical applications for agriculture, the concept struggled to find acceptance among policymakers and practitioners, highlighting how even well-developed solutions can fail to reach their intended audience.
The article contrasts typical audience reactions with those of mindful sceptics, showing how combining curiosity with critical thinking creates more fertile ground for new ideas. This comparison demonstrates that while most groups default to disengagement or dismissal, mindful sceptics engage constructively through questioning, evaluation, and evidence-based assessment.
The broader implications for society emerge as the piece examines how our collective ability to recognise good ideas impacts global problem-solving. In an era of complex environmental and social challenges, our limited capacity to identify and nurture innovative solutions poses a significant barrier to progress. This suggests an urgent need to develop better approaches to idea evaluation and acceptance.
Postscript on afterbefore
I tried hard to get some traction for Afterbefore but failed.
It is a neat idea, and five years on from its inception, AI offers computational technologies that could take the framework to the moon.
Someone will, or perhaps already has, build a very similar tool because how we manage soil on agricultural lands is up there with geopolitical instability, fossil fuel shortages and climate change as an existential human threat.
I wish them every success.
In the next issue
When Perfect Solutions Block Progress.
Ever wonder why we struggle to act on climate change despite knowing so much about it? Next week, I'll share a surprising insight from my years studying soil biology that changed how I think about environmental action.
You'll discover why waiting for perfect solutions might be our most significant obstacle to progress and how embracing 'good enough' could unlock real change.
Plus, I'll show you a few simple ways to apply this thinking to your environmental concerns.
AI Use Statement
This article was conceived, written and edited by a human who occasionally used AI tools to assist with grammar, editing, summaries and focused searches.