Why “Yes And” is killing your ideas

My daughter's favourite game is Exploding Kittens. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, think Russian Roulette but with kittens. (And no one actually dies in real life. Just to be clear).

Exploding Kittens started as a Kickstarter campaign by game designer Elan Lee and The Oatmeal cartoonist Matthew Inman. The campaign became one of the most successful in Kickstarter's history, raising nearly $9mil USD from over 200,000 backers in 30 days. Elan and Matthew went on to create a game empire.

Because of my family's love of their games, I reached out to Elan to have a chat on How I Work.

This is what he said:

Not what most creativity experts say. Definitely not what most leaders say.

But here's why Elan bans Yes And.

The team behind Exploding Kittens generates thousands of ideas in a single day during their quarterly design retreats. Thousands. And they kill almost all of them just as fast. The reason they can do this without everyone leaving in tears isn't because they’re nicer than the rest of us. It’s because they’ve built a culture where the idea lives at the centre, not the ego.

“Yes and” slows that down. It keeps bad ideas on life support. It forces the room to nurture seedlings that will never grow. And when you’re trying to get through a thousand ideas before lunch, you don’t have time to “yes and” your way through each one.

Elan’s team works on a simple rule: if someone says “kill it”, the idea dies - unless someone else jumps in to defend it. And if no one cares enough to fight for it, then it wasn’t worth saving.

It’s fast. It’s ruthless. And strangely, it’s freeing.

Because once you remove personal pride from the process, judgement stops feeling like judgement. It feels like momentum. It feels like permission to take bigger swings, knowing that if your idea face-plants, you haven’t lost status - you’ve simply cleared space for the next one.

It also made me realise why so many brainstorms feel sluggish. Most teams turn up with no constraints and no clear mechanism for saying no. So they politely meander. They polish things that shouldn’t exist. They leave the room with one lukewarm idea and a headache.

Meanwhile, the Exploding Kittens team walks into a room filled with inflatable pool toys, dog toys and random objects from a hardware store and says: “Grab two things. Make a game.” Constraints first. Brutal editing second. Magic third.

As someone who has spent a lot of time helping clients with psychological safety, here’s the thing I didn’t expect: their safety doesn’t come from protecting ideas. It comes from protecting momentum.

So if you’re trying to create something exceptional in the real world, the more generous move might be the honest one.

Kill the idea. Keep the person. Move on.

Listen to the full interview here.