The Bahramdipity Trap: Killing Ideas Before They Breathe

This chapter introduces bahramdipity, a micro-level dynamic in which fragile, still-forming ideas are intentionally curtailed by those with evaluative authority before their potential can unfold. Although innovation scholarship often emphasizes breakthrough moments or formal decision processes, the earliest phases of idea emergence are especially vulnerable to subtle but deliberate forms of suppression. Through illustrative vignettes and a synthesis of research on voice, silence, psychological safety, and attention, the chapter conceptualizes bahramdipity as an interpersonal phenomenon rooted in asymmetries of power, status, and interpretive bandwidth. Leaders and supervisors often rely on heuristics or defensive routines that privilege predictability over exploration, consciously choosing to narrow the cognitive and relational space in which nascent insights can breathe. Drawing on insights from academic laboratories, technical teams, hybrid workplaces, and managerial settings, the chapter shows how everyday dismissals, delays, and deferrals—even when outwardly polite or framed as pragmatic—function as intentional acts that shape the ecology of ideas long before formal evaluation occurs. These moments accumulate into patterned expectations about which ideas are permissible, who is entitled to speculate, and which forms of curiosity are legitimate. Bahramdipity thus represents a microfoundation of innovation failure: a mechanism by which organizations erode serendipity potential not through overt resistance to change, but through routine interpersonal encounters in which those with authority intentionally domesticate novelty at its source. By illuminating this early-stage suppression, the chapter invites managers to pay closer attention to the fleeting interactions that determine whether a fragile idea survives its first exposure. For organizational scholars, it reframes innovation as a process shaped as much by interpersonal micro-dynamics as by structural conditions. The chapter concludes by preparing the ground for the next, where bahramdipity is examined as an organizational pattern, embedded in routines, cultures, and systems that systematically constrain the emergence of novel insight.