Love on Dorondo Bay

During family reunions, my cousins, brothers and I often play a game called Mad Gab. If you've never played, the premise is simple and infuriating. You are given a card with a string of nonsense words that, when read aloud with the right cadence and phonetic emphasis, sound like a common phrase.

For example: "Eye Mull of Mush Sheen" becomes "I'm a Love Machine."

You stare at the card, your logical mind trying to read the words as they are written ("Eye... Mull... of..."), while your creative ear tries to hear the hidden meaning. Most of us play the game with focused, quiet intensity. We mutter. We squint. We try to force logic.

And then there is my cousin Lindsey.

Lindsey does not do "quiet intensity." Lindsey’s strategy is volume and chaos. She doesn't just read the card, she yells it. She shouts the nonsense words with supreme enthusiasm, testing out random inflections, accents, and speeds.

"LOVE ON DORONDO BAY!" she screams.

To the uninitiated, it sounds like she is losing her mind. In fact, she occasionally convinces herself that her wrong answer is the right one, arguing that "Love on Dorondo Bay" must be a famous movie she just hasn’t seen. Truth be told, we all do that when we play Mad Gab.

It would be easy to find Lindsey’s approach distracting.

But here is the secret- A teammate like Lindsey helps you win.

While I am stuck in my own head, trapped by the way I’m reading the words, Lindsey is throwing raw data into the air. She is breaking the phonetic pattern. When she yells "DORONDO BAY," she might be wrong, but her specific pronunciation triggers something in my brain. The way she stretches the vowel, or the weird emphasis she puts on the second syllable, suddenly unlocks the code for me..

"Love, Honor, and Obey!"

Someone solves the riddle, but only because Lindsey was brave enough to be loud and vulnerable.

This is exactly how innovation works. Brainstorming is not about waiting until you have the “right” answer to speak up. The best ideas often come from the collision of imperfect thoughts.

You need a Lindsey on your team. You need someone confident enough to shout out the nonsense, to test the half-baked idea, and to potentially be wrong. Because their "wrong" might be the exact phonetic key you need to unlock the "right."

Stop trying to solve puzzles in silence. Make some noise.