Doesn't Bob understand that nobody can remain a "thinker".
You have to actually do something like experimenting, prototyping, proving your hypothesis, etc.
Someone can't just come to you and tell you something is a problem then you spend an hour having a "big think" and then tell them the solution. Because if you think it works like that, then someone else already found the solution before hand, since your knowledge is based on pre-existing solutions.
If you encounter a problem nobody has ever encountered before you're going to need to spend time finding,researching, and testing the solution.
Ideas that have never been tried and/or tested are rather useless things. If you embraced untested ideas right out of the gate and the ideas wind up turning to shit once they're put under stress(especially if we're talking about government bullshit like The Great leap Forward) you then have entities trying to hide the inefficiencies in the system despite them being glaringly apparent, because nobody wants to admit that they're wrong.
