Lifecycle of an “IDEA” – PART II
What’s the magic sauce that turns those Poor ideas into Good? What exactly changes over the idea & how does that fall in place?
First things first!!
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A Quick Recap of “PART - I”:
The previous part talked about these:
→ lifecycle & the 3-Os (Objective, Opportunity, Outcome) of an IDEA
→ how it ought to possess a few crucial parts to even get classified as an IDEA
→ CASE STUDY (Facebook)
→ reasons why an IDEA gets classified as POOR
And of course, we left with the thought that there could be something of a process which great teams & orgs. periodically subject their idea pool to & how that could be quintessential in defining their successes, overturning them ideas from Poor to Good.
So, with an onus on maximizing the number of ideas generated over a given cadence it is very possible that one is staring at a POOL of ideas with a huge percentage of them (~95+%) being POOR given how they fall short of satisfying those 3-Os (OBJECTIVE, OPPORTUNITY & OUTCOME).
This is where we stand as of now, in a land full of questions like:
How does one turn a POOR IDEA to a GOOD one?
How does one REFINE those IDEAS so as to make it acceptable?
What does the REFINEMENT entail as a step?
Let’s see how we can go about addressing each of them.
Iterative Idea Refinement as proposed [Design Thinking Process] happens to be a crucial step in the process of overturning those Poor ideas to GOOD ones. But it is equally important for one to understand that a majority of the work ought to happen over the minor area & it very rarely flows over to the major area given how the OBJECTIVE could be clear 9.9 / 10 times.
The process of refinement could entail a few methodical steps.
STEP 1: IDENTIFICATION
There’s always a high probability of an idea turning out to be POOR as it is generated or in its native or RAW form. Given 2025, I think we could safely venture out to quote that nobody in the world is naïve enough to take a bet on something that’s a fleeting thought or a mere extension of it. So, as much as one is labeling something as POOR, they ought to get back to the board & be able to work out the mechanics towards IDENTIFYING & placing that into the exactly either one or more of those brackets over the 3Os.
Where’s the idea falling apart & why is it POOR? Where is it lacking?
Does it fall short of alignment towards an OBJECTIVE?
Isn’t the OPPORTUNITY strongly tending towards the objective?
Is the approach towards solutioning / the OUTCOME considerably strong enough?
STEP 2: RUMINATION & SYNTHESIS
This is of course the backbone of the whole exercise. Ruminating over the 3Os & having identified where the idea is lacking really ought to lend enough clarity over the weaker spots towards zeroing in on them & trying to bail yourself out & moving the idea from POOR to GOOD. And this could obviously run into multiple cases.
CASE 1: Lacking in OBJECTIVITY:
The objective tells us what we are looking to achieve. Its ought to act like the holy grail for teams given how many individual team members may not really be a part of those strategy discussions. So, the leadership ought to be able to track the understanding of teams even prior to them embarking on anything that classifies as solid work. The one thing that objectivity often results in, is an acute understanding of the scope / the boundary walls so to speak.
Some questions for leaders to ask before the teams proceed & ensure that the teams absolutely clear about the scope boundaries:
How many team members understand the objective?
Do they have a measure of the Long-term & Short-term goals?
Are teams clear about the metric we are chasing – the MTMM?
Are teams stating the outcome outright over every one of those internal documents circulated towards building a shared understanding?
CASE 2: Blunt / Lack-luster OPPORTUNITY:
Think of opportunities like directions on a map presented to you over a dashboard. The destination (end goal) is clearly stated, when the optimal path seems to be clearly sorted over environmental parameters like traffic, roadblocks etc. given that there could be multiple ways to reach there. The major stakeholders ought to come together, collaborate, brainstorm, analyze & weigh out all the pros & cons towards establishing the details of the routes. When some situations call for some dynamic action plans as knee-jerk reactions, they also ought to be able to explain what they would do if they hit a temporary roadblock as such in between & have that SPECed out to some degree of detail. Being forewarned is being four-armed.
Questions that ought to be popped at this stage:
Do we have a measure of all the opportunities as correlative to the idea?
Are we clear on the magnitude of scale & will the opportunity help us get there?
Are we spending enough time over hardcore descriptive research?
Does our research cover all the problems that are relevant to a given market?
Is there any way we could generate more such opportunities by hitting areas we haven’t as yet?
Have we been divergent enough in our thinking / identification of opportunities?
CASE 3: Vague OUTCOME:
If the teams work on initiatives that happen to be tangential to the strategy & don’t cover that core area, chances are that they may surely be way-off in terms of the outcomes & could be a visible daylight of gap between where they had to be & where they are. Yes, it could be tough or next to impossible at times to tell whether an idea would make it to the top & be able to revolutionize the market. But, having said that, it is quintessential to scope if those initiatives when broken down to granularity would result in a desired outcome or not, so as to pin on them that have a higher probability of success. And that’s what it comes down to in the end, doesn’t it?
Some questions that are of relevance here at this stage would be:
Do we have first-hand information that the solution route we plan to take would be relevant to the users vis-à-vis the options that are already available right now?
What other ways can we solve the problem for the users here?
Are we leveraging the right technologies towards reaching the solution?
Do we have enough alternatives to test them out with the users?
Does it pass the Desirability, Viability & Feasibility tests & come out in flying colors?
Think of this step as a totally regressive one as it may involve going back & forth over those ideas that are a part of the pool, revisiting, realigning, reshuffling them until they could be called good to go (GOOD IDEA).
“Refinement is about being yourself & improving thereof, it is not about imitating others but it rather is about discovering / rediscovering your own self, your own unique elegance in terms of the value it would add to all the parties / personae involved"
STEP 3: REFORM
Post synthesis as a result of some deep rumination over the causations of the idea being a misfit, calls for some reorganization or reformation of sorts. Although the cases represented here in the previous step could appear plain & simple on the outset, they could be really deeply nuanced alongside other environmental & situational challenges that may take center stage, the complexity seemingly at the mercy of the quantum of variables under consideration. One could perceive each of those questions to trigger a few follow-up questions towards getting one to a certain degree of clarity that could qualify as enough to pass through.
All that done, the whole enumeration of ideas ought to go through a re-ranking exercise so as to reassign those priorities, enabling the changes to get factored in over those constraints / approaches thereof.
So, typically a reform exercise ought to entail a few mandatory questions like:
Post the re-ranking exercise, which ideas are seemingly good to make the cut preempting the ones already a part of the idea pool?
And supposing the idea isn’t good enough to be carried now, can it be parked with special attributes so as to enable a revisit as suitable?
Please remember:
Be it the 17th century or the 2025s, ideas are seminal as they have always been. A good idea always has the power to transform & change the way world perceives things, change the status quo, bettering the way we live. But there’s an elaborate process towards generating, classifying, organizing, ranking, prioritizing which one (GOOD IDEAS) to take ahead & what exactly ought to be done with the others that don’t fit the bill for now…
And whatever else, an idea certainly isn’t equivalent to a fleeting thought or a figment of one’s imagination. There’s always so much more to it.