Scott Berkun has two great posts on idea killers and idea helpers in his blog. Idea killers are statements that stop ideas in their tracks. Idea helpers “act as idea fertilizer, helping them to grow, find homes, make friends, and grow from ideas into solutions.” Here is my selection from each category:
Idea Killers
- Corporate won’t support it.
- We can never sell this idea to the client
- Not an interesting problem
- Don’t you have enough to do?
- We tried that already
- Don’t worry about that - we have smart people working on it
- I am sure someone has already thought of that
- If it worked they would have implemented it
- Isn’t Google already working on something like that?
- We don’t have time
- Do it in your spare time, if it is succesfull we maybe use it
- If we had more time, I’d say go for it.
- Let’s take that offline
- I’ll look into it…
Idea helpers
- Why not?
- How can I help you?
- Good, lets make a prototype and see if it holds together.
- What should we change to help make this happen?
- Go for it!
The number of items in each category reflects my recent experience. Idea killers were more abundant and were coming from a variety of sources. Idea helpers were quite rare and mostly coming from my relatives and friends. What is your experience?
The first is the list of things that people with a lot bad ideas hear when people with good judgement need to redirect back to reality. The second is the list of things you will hear if you come up with a good idea.
Bravo Joe! Damn well said. Ideas are not hard. Everyone has ideas, ideas are everywhere. What is hard is a good, original idea that can be developed in a reasonable time and to fit market needs. This is hard, or we would all be millionaires.
Try brainstorming with only green light all the time and you’ll soon be flooded with dozens of ideas to see what I mean.
No, the view of two lists here is too simplistic. As a manager, you need to KILL THE IDEA BUT HELP THE PERSON. Its not all about that idea, but about encouraging truly creative people in the long term.
Better than “We’ll never sell it to the client” is to ask the person “who would buy this and why?” Now they have a tool for killing this idea and for challenging their own ideas next time. Better than “If it worked they would have already implemented it” would be “It sounds so obvious, either its a brilliant idea or are there some fundamental barriers here and thats why nobody has done it?”. Another discernment tool.
[...] One of my early posts was about idea killers and idea helpers. Idea killers are common phrases that kill creativity at its origin. Recently, Matt May wrote a piece called Mind of the Innovator: Taming the Traps of Traditional Thinking, where he identified ‘Seven Sins of Solutions,’ routine patterns of thinking that prevent people from being creative. He suggests that idea stiffling is the worst sin being the most destructive. He illustrated the point by a nice experiment: At the off-site, there were about 75 people of varying degrees of seniority, ranging from field supervisors to senior execs. i gave the assignment, one of those group priority exercises whereby you rank a list of items individually and then as a group and compare (sort of a “wisdom of crowds” exercise to show that “we” is smarter than “me”). this specific exercise required you to rank 25 items with which you’ve crashed on the moon in relation to how important they were to your survival. nasa had compiled the correct ranking, so there was a clear answer. [...]