23How to Choose the Right Ideas

A fast way to shortlist and select the best ideas to take forward.

Categorising Ideas

At this stage, people have already started making up their minds about which ideas they prefer. And that's not usually a good thing, especially if you're looking for disruptive ideas.

Even though one disruptive idea can deliver higher returns than a string of incremental ideas,1 they usually get filtered out at this stage. And two overlapping perceptions are to blame: ‘It's too risky,’ and, ‘It's too difficult.’

Illustration depicting the fourth step of a lightweight process that follows three essential and sequential steps, for assessing and selecting ideas.

© Elvin Turner.

Both may be true, but it's too early to make those assumptions. So, to help keep the ‘crazy’ ideas alive a little longer, start to categorise them according to their potential impact and ease of implementation:

Illustration categorising ideas into four quadrants according to their potential impact and ease of implementation: Futile, Crazy, Transient, and Hot.

How to Use It

  1. Sketch the above diagram on a flipchart.
  2. Take each idea and ask the group in which area it should sit.
  3. Now take a step back and see what you're left with. Ideally you'll have some Hot ideas that you can take to the next stage of development – ideas with a lot of potential impact and that are reasonably easy to implement. But don't wrap things up here.

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