>Ideas need time to be explored, and given a chance.
sure, and the time for that is before you bring them to potential critics.
unless a meeting is intended as a brainstorming session where any thought, no matter how unformed, is welcome, meetings are not a time to present your initial unexplored thoughts to colleagues, bosses, or other departments. take a couple days, think about it without spending other people's time, try to imagine people's objections and have answers to them. then present. shouting things out in a meeting before you've considered and come up with answers to the most obvious counter-arguments is just a time-waster.
You must have very different kinds of meetings than I do. Unless you're going into that meeting with a rehearsed PowerPoint presentation, or there's a strict agenda that doesn't allow any time for exploration, I expect to hear imperfect-ideas-in-infancy. One of the reasons we have meetings is to allow collaboration to happen. It's a format for working together.
Yes, meetings vary profoundly in terms of their quality, purpose, and participation. For instance, is it a meeting of peers, or are managers in the room? If there's a large disparity of roles in attendance (e.g., junior engineers, marketing managers, and maybe one or two executives), it's different than if it's a true meeting of peers. And if managers are capable of attending those meetings without quashing collaboration, hats off to them.
Really depends on the context I think, brainstorming session? Naysaying does have a habbit of stunting an idea's growth in the session. Sometimes you need to imagine you've solved a bunch of hard problems before you can explore the value the idea has.
I say this as a semi-reformed naysayer. I am critical of implementation plans, but let ideas breath a bit in a more exploratory setting before I start bringing up constraints.
Isn’t proving a market exists, building a proof of concept, etc, all examples of exploring an idea? Those seem like perfectly reasonable expectations.
If the proof of concept takes an hour to code up, or proving the market exists just takes a bit of googling, then sure, you can prepare that before the first meeting where you suggest the idea.
If the proof of concept requires spending a few days in the machine shop making jigs and parts, purchasing equipment, and a custom PCB, then I really hope you'll bring it up for discussion beforehand in a meeting. Ten minutes of discussion with colleagues might be as useful as several iterations of prototyping. Not so that they'll shoot it down, but because someone might say "oh yeah, we have a spare mcguffin from last year's demo that you can use, should save you lots of time."
sure, and the time for that is before you bring them to potential critics.
unless a meeting is intended as a brainstorming session where any thought, no matter how unformed, is welcome, meetings are not a time to present your initial unexplored thoughts to colleagues, bosses, or other departments. take a couple days, think about it without spending other people's time, try to imagine people's objections and have answers to them. then present. shouting things out in a meeting before you've considered and come up with answers to the most obvious counter-arguments is just a time-waster.