The goal of dreaming is to produce an original idea. The idea can be new to you, new to your group, or new to the world. But how do you know which it is? And how do you know if it’s any good in the first place?
In my experience, creative judgment comes with practice, maturity, and familiarity with the world of ideas. There’s no shortcut. But there is a shorthand for recognizing the potential of an idea at the point of epiphany. I’ve distilled it down to a list of six questions:
A great idea should be unsettling—not just to you, but to others in your group. Some people may reject it on the spot. This is not always a bad sign, since the potential of a new idea is often inversely proportional to its comfort factor.
Other people may simply find the idea baffling if it doesn’t jibe with their existing beliefs. For example, when talking pictures became possible, H.M. Warner was firmly against it: “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” he roared. Some people believed airplanes would have no military value; that broadcast radio could not become popular; that no one would want a computer at home; and that educated people would never contribute to an encyclopedia without being paid. When you hear these kinds of comments, your antennae should tingle.
A good idea kills two birds with one stone. A great idea kills ten or twenty. This is the place where the pick-up sticks overlap, the pattern that tells you when a solution is elegant. The opposite of an elegant solution is one with too many trade-offs. In politics, trade-offs are often placed on a pedestal, held up as examples of “the art of compromise.” But great ideas don’t come from compromise. They come from common ground.
Let’s say you’re trying to imagine a new product for your company. A great product idea would combine a dozen desirable traits in a single move. It might cost less to produce, use the existing supply chain, reposition the company’s chief competitor, reenergize the workforce, attract more talent, inspire free publicity, deepen customer loyalty, increase annual revenues, produce higher profit margins, drive up the stock price, benefit the community, and create a platform for a whole new class of products. Twelve birds right there.
Original ideas are unproven by definition—and therefore inherently risky. If an idea doesn’t need to be tested, it’s probably because it’s not very original or not very bold. The skepticism that calls for a proof of concept is one of the signals of originality.
When my design firm was tapped by Apple in 1988 to rethink the packaging for the company’s range of software products, one of the ideas we presented was a retail package with nothing on the front but a simple hand-drawn icon, a product name, a trademark, and a splash of color. At the time, no self-respecting software package would go out dressed in less than five colors, one or more photos of people using computers, at least three screen shots, and six or seven bullet points explaining its features—and this was just the front panel.
Bill Campbell, then president of the software business, was curious enough about the “white look” to test it with customers. As it turned out, this became the company’s most successful format, increasing revenues by 40 percent across the product line in the first year, and inspiring the clean white packaging now associated with Apple. When your idea is bold enough to trigger the testing instinct, you might be onto something.
Great ideas are not polite. They never say they’re sorry. They don’t try to fit in. On the contrary, they force the world around them to make changes in self-defense.
In the 1950s, a small advertising agency named Doyle Dane Bernbach had a big idea: humor. In the hard-drinking, hard-selling days of Madison Avenue, humor was universally frowned on. The prevailing mantra was “the more you tell, the more you sell.” The current voice of reason, David Ogilvy, maintained that “people do not buy from clowns.” DDB’S creative teams not only believed they did, but delivered their witty headlines and graphics with stark simplicity. Over the next decade any agency that couldn’t create clean, humorous ads began to see its status sink like a stale olive in a cheap martini.
Affordances are the opportunities inherent in a new idea. As Kevin Kelly said in What Technology Wants, good ideas “come woven in a web of auxiliary ideas, consequential notions, supporting concepts, foundational assumptions, side effects, logical consequences, and a cascade of subsequent possibilities.” An affordance of Twitter, for example, is to enable instant communication in places where communication is controlled, such as the Middle East during the Arab Spring rebellions. An affordance of democracy is that citizens can voice their opinions without the threat of reprisals. An affordance of baking soda is that it can soak up fridge odors in addition to making cakes rise.
The measure of a great idea is the number and quality of the affordances it throws off. If innovation is evolution by design, then the best idea is the one that affords the most choices.
Every innovation—whether a government, gadget, service, iPhone app, movie plot, or business model—can be reduced to a one-sentence description. The US government is a democracy of the people, for the people, and by the people. A Nano MP3 player puts four thousand songs at your fingertips. The Heathrow Express whisks you to London in 15 minutes flat. The Pages tablet application lets you be a writer one second and a designer the next. In Talk to Her, two men form an odd friendship while their girlfriends are in comas. Charles Schwab makes investing personal.
The reason a great idea can be described in a sentence is not because it’s simple but because it has a strong internal order, one that answers to a clear and compelling purpose. The full idea may be quite complex. Complexity without order is an indescribable mess, while complexity with order appears simpler than it is. If you find it hard to describe your idea, don’t fix your description. Fix your idea.
The metaskill of dreaming, the ability to cut ideas out of whole cloth, is not a subject currently taught in business schools—or any other schools. This seems odd in an age when innovation is the dividing line between success and failure. But the gap could grow even wider as aesthetics are asked to play a greater role the way ideas are realized.
The 20th century has made us believe that everything of value can be bought in a store; that the answer to the question lies at the back of the chapter; that design is something only designers do.
But now, in the 21st century, we’re being nudged nervously forward—by our customers, by our employers, by our economy, and by the robots nipping at our heels—to be original. To innovate. To make things. Yes, make things.
Next up, Part 4: Making
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.