There’s great value in lousy ideas.
If you want to find a diamond 💎, you’ve got to mine ⛏️through a whole lot of rock.
I recently spoke with Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn. They teach at Stanford’s d.school*. They share my fascination on how ideas reach scale.
Here’s a couple of takeaways from a upcoming podcast that will come out later this year.
1. Good ideas don’t just come from the C-suite. They can come from anywhere within the organization. So don’t fall in love with titles, pedigree, or status.
2. The best predictor of a finding good iddea is the total number of ideas iterated. They measure the rate of “ideaflow.”
3. It takes a surprising number of ideas to reach one that i actually good and worth acting on. They cite a 2000:1 ratio.
Yes — 2000:1.
To paraphrase Jaws 🦈, you’re going to need a bigger boat! 🛥️
So, there’s definitely a hierarchy of ideas —
not all ideas are good and useful.
There’s immense value in generating a lot of lousy ideas.
Poor ideas are worth celebrating —
if and only if they keep you going
and prompt you to generate more ideas.
The biggest mistake would be:
You come up with a poor idea and the come to a full stop.
You give up. “It’s not worth my time” you tell yourself.
Keep going!
Remember, if you want to find a diamond, you need to move a lot of rock.
Remember that 2000:1 ratio for ideas.
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I write about
#ThoughtLeadership, #OrgTL, and taking #Ideas to scale
I publish on
most weekdays and some weekends
* Note: The “d.school” is more formally known as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford ( d.school ).
