Why every idea is a good idea

Embracing the creative flow—why no idea is too strange, too small, or too early.

You sit in a meeting discussing the action plan for the next project. Suddenly, the lightbulb turns on in your head, you have the best idea you've ever had. You voice your idea out loud, you're excited and fired up. "I don't think that's a good idea," someone says. You look back down and start scribbling circles in your notebook without contributing to the session any longer.

No one can read another person's mind

Oftentimes, when you come up with an idea, your brain goes on at incredible speeds and you think of multiple scenarios and variations before voicing it out loud. Your thought process is complex, and the idea itself has many nuances to it that you can't communicate with a few sentences.

There is a time and a place for this later in the process, but when we're purely talking about coming up with new concepts and ideas, we should stick to high-level concepts that are broad, easy to understand, and lack minute details.

Challenge, don't judge

Let me let you in on a little secret. There are actually bad ideas. But the point of this article is to spark something inside you to think about how you act in a situation like this.

So, how do you navigate around the bad ideas without discouraging others from sharing their thoughts and ideas in the future?

Ask questions. Give some context and let the idea contributor figure out if there are flaws in their idea or plan. If you attack, they will defend. But by taking their side and building the idea with them while asking questions, you allow them to come to the conclusion themselves whether the idea is good or bad.

But also trust others, they just might know something you don't. And if you can't poke holes in their idea by challenging them with questions, maybe it really is a good idea.

Sometimes bad ideas are worth trying out. Many good story starts with a bad idea. You never know where the path may lead beforehand.

Always add, never subtract

Voicing your ideas out loud requires a certain atmosphere and a level of safety. Some people are more open and confident in voicing their ideas, and others are more inclined to share unfinished ideas.

But you don't want to miss the contribution of the people who are not as ready to voice their own thoughts so readily. But to some level, we're all wired to be afraid of rejection.

By saying "That's a great idea, what if we added this thing to it," instead of "What about we do this thing instead", you welcome the other person's idea instead of rejecting it and you're contributing to their idea instead of tearing it down and replacing it with your own. I think this has a huge impact on how openly people will share their thoughts and ideas in the future.

Because now they've given a great idea that sparked something within other people. Now the person is invested in the idea and feels good about themselves. They feel encouraged to share more because they just positively contributed to the situation.

Friends

There's a great YouTube channel called Pitch Meeting that focuses on making satirical sketches about what it must've been like when tv-show or a movie was initially pitched. Most of the topics of these videos don't really make sense on a conceptual level when they're dissected, but there was something that the creators of these shows and movies saw that couldn't be explained, analysed, or understood by others.

Circling back to the first topic of reading other people's minds. There are so many minor details that someone can see in their own head without being able to communicate them all. All of our views are shaped by the lives we've lived. Determination is also a big factor that's hard to quantify. Whenever someone stands by their idea and truly believes in it, they are a force of nature that we can only try to steer in the right direction.

In the case of Friends, there must have been something in the dynamic or personalities of the characters the creators saw that made them think it's an idea worth making. And I'm glad they did, because the world would be much worse without "How you doin'?"