As the head of your organization, you may have a strong vision about where you and your team need to go. You are making sure that all aspects of your business are in alignment and that people are working together to help you achieve specific organizational goals.

But, how do you deal with novelty? New ideas or new perspectives can be generated by advisers, customers, or occur at any point within an organization.

How you and your team handle new information speaks volumes about the health of your organization.

Are you reactive and completely dismiss new ideas, thoughts, or actions? Are you patient and committed to keeping eye on a situation to see how it develops? What if the idea comes not from a customer, but from within? Or perhaps you set up a framework where an idea can be tested immediately? There are clearly a lot of different ways that you can look at this.

Regardless, if you are interested in growth and creating an influx of fresh thought on your team, it’s important to not react negatively or to try and defend yourself. This is a good way to turn people off to your organization and will weaken you as a leader.

There is a way for organizations to react to a steady influx of ideas. Create a feedback loop so that ideas coming in at any point in your organization will have the means to cycle through your team in an open and transparent manner. Ideas can be discussed and tested and then dismissed or put into action.

The act of consideration of the idea is what is important. Some ideas will work out, others not. Or an idea may not be ready at this moment in time, but possibly at a point in the future.

The nature of the modern organization is that you must be committed to investigating new ideas.

This is how you discover and create new markets.