Better Odds: Shotgun Strategy
When you don't know the odds, play a lot of hands.
A few posts back, I wrote about the uncertainty of quality that comes from non-obvious ideation prompts. To recap very quickly, there tends to be limited scope for both great and terrible ideas within the obvious way of looking at a challenge, and the average quality of ideas is much more predictable within that obvious mental model.
I sketched out the flatter idea quality distribution curve that comes from using a variety of ideation prompts outside of the range of the obvious:
If we ask why on earth we’d waste time on all those other ideation prompts when the prompt represented by the curve at the far right is obviously the best – well, the answer is that, in this case, until we try coming up with ideas, we don’t actually know how good or bad the prompts are. That’s why we try a number of them and see what happens.
I also noted that this is the answer to that final question I asked when I introduced this model of idea quality distribution. That is – to get more great ideas, we can flatten the curve, with fewer average (obvious) ideas and more terrible and great (non-obvious) ideas. Lots of indeterminate ideation prompts make a flatter idea quality curve.
And in the last post, I talked a bit about how this relates to the specific situation of the creative marketing agency, where non-obvious ideas have additional value. That is, when you don’t have the time or the data to develop an ideation prompt that will produce predictably better ideas, it’s okay (and advisable) to try out several.
The same rationale applies to any situation where the quality of a source of ideas is unpredictable. I think I can touch on several such situations in a single post. Here goes.
When you don’t know who’s better at coming up with good ideas, get ideas from everyone.
I believe that good ideas can come from anyone and anyone can have good ideas. But ideation is a numbers game, and for various reasons, in various situations, some people will have better ideas than others on average. For examples…
Professional advertising creatives tend to have better advertising ideas. Experienced creatives have developed instincts for what will work, what seeds of ideas are worth pursuing, etc. They tend to have bigger libraries in their brains of past creative ideas from the industry, from which they can take and recombine elements. The good ones are more familiar with mentally sidestepping obviousness.
Subject-matter experts tend to have better ideas within the realm of the obvious. Someone who is very experienced with a topic will have more pieces of information to connect together for ideas, will instinctively know what should work and shouldn’t work, etc. But note the little disclaimer there – expertise tends to be expertise within the obvious, the familiar mental models. When it comes to thinking outside the box, expertise can be an incredible obstacle.
If we take just these two examples, I can make my point about when to bet on the quality of the individuals coming up with ideas. If you’re coming up with ad ideas, get your ad creatives to come up with ideas. But the fact that they’re good at coming up with ad ideas doesn’t automatically translate into being good at coming up with, say, product innovation ideas, cost-cutting ideas, PR event ideas. I wouldn’t exclude them from that kind of ideation – they might be great, but their quality isn’t as predictable.
Similarly with subject-matter experts. Someone with 30 years of experience in doing something tends to have 30 years of experience in the way things are done – that is, within the established best-practice mental model. If you’re looking for good ideas within that established way of seeing things, experts will be better ideators. If you’re looking for great ideas which break out of the established way of seeing things, don’t limit yourself to experts.
When personal experience and worldview strongly correlates with obviousness, use a diverse range of ideators.
Our worldviews are strongly conditioned by our personal and cultural experience. I am a straight, white, English-speaking, able-bodied, childless, middle-aged dude. Along with various other things, these factors condition my experience of the world and thus my view of the world – my horizon of disclosure. As a result, there are considerations and ideas which unthinkable to me, but would naturally occur to someone who was Queer, a person of colour, a non-English speaker, disabled, a parent, younger, older, a woman, non-binary, etc.
What kind of diversity is relevant depends on the nature of the strategic/creative challenge. If you’re ideating around product design for broad consumer usage or policy design for a population, the kind of diversity mentioned above can be hugely relevant. If you’re ideating around service design for software developers, a more relevant diversity might be along the lines of preferred coding language or development platforms.
For our purposes here, the point is: when we don’t know which diverse perspectives will generate better ideas for a particular challenge, weave that kind of diversity into your ideation. This is often the case when homogenous perspectives and dominant mental models align – for example, if the dominant mental model (obviousness) is very masculine, you will struggle to generate non-obvious ideas from a room full of men.
When one ideation prompt seems as good as any other, use a diverse range of ideation prompts.
I’m repeating myself a little here, because this was touched on in the last post. But it does bear repeating. When there is no strong data-led rational indicator of the best ideation prompt to generate effective solutions to a problem, you won’t know which works best until you try it. So try several.
Yes, it divides creative efforts between multiple approaches. Yes, there is value in tightly directed creative ideation – digging one deep well and not several shallow wells. But only when you’re confident that you’re digging in the right spot. To take that “digging a well” analogy a little further, when you don’t know how deep in the ground the water is from one spot to the next, it’s better to dig in several spots rather than putting all of your eggs in one basket. (Mixing metaphors there, but you follow me.)
The above is especially true in workshop design and in design thinking, rapid prototyping, etc.
There are almost no cases where a workshop’s ideation activities do not benefit from a diverse range of people ideating against a diverse range of ideation prompts.
And in rapid prototyping, the uncertainty of idea quality is built into the process – we don’t know what designs or features will work until we try them.
It is extremely satisfying to use colour-by-numbers strategy, available data, and logical rationale to arrive at the right way to approach a problem – the best ideation prompt. In contrast, it can feel extremely dissatisfying to generate three, five or ten ideation prompts and admit, “Hey, I honestly don’t know which of these is best.”
Trust in the laws of big numbers. Make each ideation prompt as interesting as possible. When non-obvious ideas are required, ensure a range of ideators with relevantly diverse worldviews, and/or non-experts to balance out the blinkered thinking that comes with expertise.
This is fun. I promise, it’s so much fun.