It is very exciting to start a new project. Maybe you hear about something that sparks an idea, or maybe a new thought comes to you out of nowhere. It is a great feeling, isn’t it? You get all excited, you discuss it with others, you start making plans or finding the resources to do it. Maybe you look for partnerships outside your organization, or you build a team to run with it from inside your firm. You present the idea formally and look for support from your peers and leadership.

And then someone finally asks the question: why are you doing this?

And you do not have an answer.

Well, maybe you have an answer, but it is not a good one. Like saying “because we can,” which is not really a reason for doing things, especially when you are investing time and resources that could be spent on other things.

I saw this happen a few years ago with a colleague from my division in a government agency, where we did strategic planning for a large bureaucratic organization. For the 3 months he was running around with an idea for using Web 2.0 concepts (he was excited about wikis, back when they were fairly new) in connection with our work, but he was never really been able to explain why. The ultimate purpose of the idea changed over time…it started out in support of our primary analytical function but at times it seems to be a strategic communication tool. He could not describe the final form he envisioned for it and so he could explain how to get from there because he doesn’t know where “there” was. When asked what problems this would solve he would say “several,” but of course the question was not “how many?” Unfortunately, he just kept tossing around sound bites and rhetoric and because he sounded like he knew what he was talking about (and his audience clearly did not) and he had a PhD, people did not force him to provide answers. But finally, in a big meeting, he gave a presentation and was asked “what impact will this have on other divisions?” He could not answer, because since he did not know what this thing would be used for, he did not know how others would have to contribute. He just looked bad.

That was unfortunate, because if he DID have to provide answers earlier, he might actually have taken this beginning of an idea and developed it into something that fixed a problem or otherwise addressed something we could have been doing better. As it is, he went far down this path, and once questions were really starting to be asked, he saw the whole thing derailed because people started asking “what, exactly, have you spent the last 3 months doing?”

This is not unique to big bureaucracies. At a recent networking event I overheard a young app developer telling someone about a new app he was creating to provide a service locally. The other person kept asking “Will anyone use it? Does anyone need it?” the point she ultimately made to him was that he should not spend his time developing the tech until he has a good idea that the tech will be used.

The bottom line is, new ideas should either be solving problems or otherwise improving necessary capabilities. Your employees would be best off by understanding your needs and thinking of ways to solve them. The second-best solution is, when you come up with a really cool idea, look carefully at your business and find something it supports…be able to explain why you are doing this. Whether they are new products or services for your customers, or new internal processes, make sure there is a reason for them besides “look what we could do!”

In much of the knowledge economy, you want your employees to be innovative. So you are liable to face this problem yourself, and you need to figure out how to keep people focused on your organization’s needs without making them feel like they are being boxed in and should not be coming up with new ideas. The trick, I think, is to ask questions like “what problems will this solve?,” or “what form do you see this taking?,” in such a way that you are seen as trying to develop the idea, not kill it. Do not pose it as a challenge, but instead use questions like this to guide a discussion and help them explain things that maybe they feel but have not put into words yet. In this way you can come up with some really creative solutions to your problems. And if they are smart, and they see that what they are coming up with sounds cool but has no applicability, they will pull the plug themselves.

Of course, you may be dealing with some ego issues here and some pride of authorship, so you need to be careful. Some people, like my old colleague, see any question like this as a challenge and they take it personally. But changing that kind of mindset is a discussion for another time.