Show Me Your Bad Ideas

We would all claim to be in a world where we implement good ideas. Every year we hear many good ideas, and now and then we have a few good ideas of our own. Ideas for positioning our business, engaging with clients, structuring our days, dietary hacks, creating content for our target market, and so on.

But truly great ideas are hard to come by. They often come from strange places, at unexpected times. In his book "Seeing What Others Don't", Gary Klein explored the different stages an idea goes through. Interestingly, an essential part of the process is the part in which we aren't really directly thinking about the problem and just let our unconscious mind take over.

In my own experience, I have found that there's no better way to arrive at a great idea than by coming up with a lot of bad (sometimes awful!) ideas. At first, the worse the better. We have to get the ideas flowing.

Advisers often tell me, ‘I never have any good ideas’. My immediate response is, “Well, show me your bad ideas?”. They often have none, and therein lies the problem.

It's only when I have a pile of bad ideas to hand that I find a great one hiding in plain sight, or indeed the early stages of what will become a great idea. I’m often heard saying to my team, ‘just get a bad version of it to me’, this article is an example in point. This means that your first idea is rarely the best one, and certainly not fully formed. Any idea, no matter how bad, has a way of opening our minds to explore the problem further, inevitably leading us closer to a great idea.

Sometimes the best ideas I’ve had have started as a joke. Something has been said in jest that turns out to be pure gold after exploring it from a slightly different direction. I call this process of finding great ideas from the obscure, the “joker in the pack”. The “joker in the pack” ideas are often wacky but become gold after being finessed.

This has implications for our work with clients too. In a client meeting, it’s possible that the first thought that comes to your mind is not the best way of addressing the challenge the client is facing. The more options/strategies are pondered and proposed, the closer you’ll be to the optimal solution. Also, with hyper-complex problems (which is what financial life planning is), I sit with the problem for a while, letting it marinate as such. The all-knowing expert who has every answer on the spot is usually the one to be avoided.

If you're the guide that's committed to being by the client's side through challenges spanning a few decades, the first idea that comes to your mind may not be the best. Humility buys you optionality in this case.

So, before you say ‘I never have any good ideas’, show me your bad ideas first - and a lot of them. It takes many digs to strike gold. Idea mining is no different.

If you have any thoughts about the above or shortcuts to finding great ideas quicker, let me know!