Thoughts & Ideas

Most organizations use some version of an innovation funnel to bring ideas to life. It starts with lots of ideas at the front end and then launches whatever survives all the way to the back end.

Yet this Darwinian process of bringing ideas to life doesn’t necessarily lead to survival of the fittest ideas. If we’re not careful, the innovation funnel leads to survival of the safest ideas.

Organizations are good at spotting risks. In an effort to improve success rates, organizations tend to put sharper teeth in the funnel.

As ideas run the organizational gauntlet, they can get pruned, sheared, shaped, and watered down beyond recognition. On the way, they can lose the essence of the idea. They may lose their point of difference and reason for being.

It's not teams that are the problem, it's the rabid insistence on teamwork. Group think. Committee decisions.

Most truly remarkable ideas did not come from teamwork. Most truly brave decisions were not made through teamwork. The team's role should be to act as a supportive environment for a collection of individuals. People with their own unique voice, ideas, thoughts, perspectives. A team should be there to encourage one another to pursue the wild ass ideas, not get in lock step to keep everything cheery and pleasant.

I guess what you’re describing is like a tweet that hits the uncanny valley of good and bad in such a precise way, with such confidence, that it just pisses everybody off.

Because if you look at this tweet for just a second you’re like ok, that’s a fine bedroom, but then you look at it, and it starts to unravel in your mind, like trying to remember a dream after you just woke up. And you’re like “what is this?” It’s like a deepfake of a person’s face.

…Ok, I’ve got some fire for you: A bad tweet is like a deepfake of an idea.

The perfect bad tweet is like something you read and you’re like “ok yeah” but then you’re like, “wait…”, and it just starts to come apart in your mind and you’re like that makes no fucking sense, just like this photo of this incredibly bad room.

I use a trick with co-workers when we’re trying to decide where to eat for lunch and no one has any ideas. I recommend McDonald’s.

An interesting thing happens. Everyone unanimously agrees that we can’t possibly go to McDonald’s, and better lunch suggestions emerge. Magic!

It’s as if we’ve broken the ice with the worst possible idea, and now that the discussion has started, people suddenly get very creative. I call it the McDonald’s Theory: people are inspired to come up with good ideas to ward off bad ones.

He was without doubt the most inquisitive human I have ever met. His insatiable curiosity was not limited or distracted by his knowledge or expertise, nor was it casual or passive. It was ferocious, energetic and restless. His curiosity was practiced with intention and rigor.

Many of us have an innate predisposition to be curious. I believe that after a traditional education, or working in an environment with many people, curiosity is a decision requiring intent and discipline.

In larger groups our conversations gravitate towards the tangible, the measurable. It is more comfortable, far easier and more socially acceptable talking about what is known. Being curious and exploring tentative ideas were far more important to Steve than being socially acceptable.

Our curiosity begs that we learn. And for Steve, wanting to learn was far more important than wanting to be right.

These days I am more interested in the reverse case [of Da Vinci's helicopter]: ideas that could have worked many centuries before they actually appeared. The economist Alex Tabarrok calls these “ideas behind their time”

Curious minds want to know why these ideas appeared so late — and whether there might be anything that would prevent delays in future. One explanation is that the ideas aren’t as simple as they appear.

The bicycle is not as straightforward an invention as it seems. To move from ox-hauled cart to human-powered bicycle requires smooth-rolling wheel bearings, which in turn need precisely engineered bearing balls. Modern steel ball bearings were not patented until the late 1700s, and demand from the 19th-century bicycle industry helped to improve their design.

Coming up with entirely novel ideas is really, really hard.

Imagine if we could turn off the fear of making something lame. Imagine how much more we'd do.

I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.

If you're going to spend years working on something, you'd think it might be wise to spend at least a couple days considering different ideas, instead of going with the first that comes into your head. You'd think. But people don't. In fact, this is a constant problem when you're painting still lifes. You plonk down a bunch of stuff on a table, and maybe spend five or ten minutes rearranging it to look interesting. But you're so impatient to get started painting that ten minutes of rearranging feels very long. So you start painting. Three days later, having spent twenty hours staring at it, you're kicking yourself for having set up such an awkward and boring composition, but by then it's too late.

With conventional placeholders, such as words, we can describe patterns for a large number of situations. On the other hand it is easy to fool yourself (and others) with words, since you can avoid to be specific. Any business meeting can confirm this.

When you draw something you are forced to be specific — and honest.

Our illustration of an “idea” from above is unconventional in the sense that it conveys specific original thoughts of what an idea is. It adds value to the words.

And that is the catch: The drawing must be unconventional to support the conventional words. We have to make sure not to use “words in disguise”. Take a common illustration for “idea” for example, which haunts flip charts all over the world: the lightbulb.

The lightbulb image works on a purely symbolic level, it only replaces the word “idea”. This image of a household item contains no original thought about what an idea is. While symbols like these work well as international replacements for words or icons to indicate a light switch for instance, they convey no nutritional value as illustrations — they are empty.