Lateral Thinking for Every Day

27

Go for quantity of ideas

Linus Pauling was a brilliant scientist who won two Nobel prizes in different fields. He said, ‘The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.’

Most managers like to be seen as decisive. They can quickly come up with an idea for tackling a problem. Doing something is generally (but not always) a better option that doing nothing. But the first answer we come up with is unlikely to be the best one.

A better approach is to take a little time to generate a long list of possible ideas and then evaluate them in order to select one or more to try. Our first idea is often the most obvious, the most straightforward response. It is rarely the best response. As we mull over the problem and force ...