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Kill Ideas Liberally If you can learn to take action more quickly, you will reap the rewards of having more preliminary data about new possibilities. But the ability to act on fledgling ideas will help only if you also have the willpower to abandon them when necessary. When asked about their greatest failures, many of the teams I met shared instances in which a new idea came up and pushed a project offtrack—an idea that should have been killed once it was clear to everyone involved that it was a dead end.

The ability to expose an idea’s faults and doubts based on data from early actions is a critical skill for productive creative teams. Often this force of skepticism comes from a few members of the team who tend to see the downside of ideas rather than their potential. Some might refer to these skeptics as “Debbie Downers” or “killjoys”—drains on the excitement in the room—but their viewpoint is incredibly valuable. Those of us who work alone must find ways to cultivate this skepticism on our own. Whether it means playing the role of the skeptic for our own ideas or engaging others to play it, we must incorporate this proactive element of doubt.

Walt Disney is known for his boundless creativity, not his skepticism. But it turns out that Disney went to great lengths to ensure that his creative teams vetted ideas ruthlessly and killed them when necessary. An article by personal development specialist Keith Trickey describes how, when developing feature-length films, Disney implemented a staged process using three different rooms to foster ideas and then rigorously assess them: Room One. In this room, rampant idea generation was allowed without any restraints.

The true essence of brainstorming— unrestrained thinking and throwing around ideas without limits—was supported without any doubts expressed.

Room Two. The crazy ideas from Room One were aggregated and organized in Room Two, ultimately resulting in a storyboard chronicling events and general sketches of characters.

Room Three. Known as the “sweat box,” Room Three was where the entire creative team would critically review the project without restraint. Given the fact that the ideas from individuals had already been combined in Room Two, the criticism in Room Three was never directed at one person—just at elements of the project.

Every creative person and team needs a Room Three. As we build teams and develop a creative process, our tendency is to privilege the no-holds-barred creativity of Room One. But the idea bloodshed that occurs in Room Three is just as important as the wild ideation of Room One. Through the use of physical space and clearly articulated objectives for the phases of idea generation, Disney created an extraordinarily productive creative enterprise that changed the world of entertainment. In their book The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, two of Walt Disney’s chief animators, wrote that “there were actually three different Walts: the dreamer, the realist, and the spoiler. You never knew which one was coming into your meeting.” It seems that Disney not only pushed his team through all three rooms, he embodied the characteristics of the three rooms himself.

The best practice here is to value the skeptic’s role in idea generation. When you find yourself (or your team) rallying around a brand-new idea or applying creative touches to a project, you must summon a dose of skepticism to ground your judgment. You don’t need to set aside three actual rooms, but you do need a period of scrutiny in your creative process. You also don’t want to create too much structure around when you can and cannot generate new ideas. However, you must be willing to kill ideas liberally—for the sake of fully pursuing others.

In a rare interview in BusinessWeek on Apple’s system for innovation, CEO Steve