An effective team of thinkers should listen to everyone’s ideas. However they can’t follow through on all of them. Inevitably some ideas fall by the wayside as you start working through them. Others will be developed into something new so you can’t recognise the original idea at all, although you needed it to arrive at the destination.

If you’re looking for one answer and you have a hundred suggestions, that’s great, but in the end 99 of them won’t feature heavily in the final result. That’s just common sense. However it can feel frustrating if one of those 99 was your suggestion. It’s even more frustrating if there were only two viable suggestions and the one that didn’t get used was yours.

It’s natural to feel frustrated, but it’s not helpful. Remember, you’re part of the hive and the collective imperative takes priority over your own personal feelings. Yes, even when you feel your idea wasn’t listened to fully or given proper consideration. I’m sympathetic, but the group will only be able to exploit its collective thinking skills properly if everyone sets their own ego to one side.

As soon as you start to feel resentful, you risk withdrawing your talents, not getting fully behind the plan, even privately hoping someone else’s idea will fail. When you do that, you create a scenario in which the team would actually be better off without you. You go from being an asset to the team to being a downright disadvantage. Your thinking skills might be sorely needed further down the line and you need to be on top form, otherwise why be part of the team?

So the hive misses out if you aren’t fully behind the scheme, and you miss out too. Yes you do, because it’s a great feeling to be part of a team that is working well together and achieving far more than any of you could do alone. And there are always other opportunities to contribute if you’re open and willing.

When you think with other people, you all have to agree on the broad direction of travel and the way you go about things. That enables you to create the synergy that can make collective thinking so powerful. You have to buy into this or there’s no point in being there. And that means all of you – not only you – have to set your egos aside. It might help to note how many other ideas and suggestions, from other members of the group, have similarly not been taken up.

Listen, an idea that doesn’t get used isn’t necessarily a waste of thinking space. It will have fed the creative mood and may, even unconsciously, have been the spark that ignited other ideas. It may also – and I mean this in the nicest possible way – have helped to cement the group’s thinking about what wouldn’t work. That doesn’t make it a bad idea, it makes it a useful one. So don’t feel grumpy. Just be glad you played your part.