Good idea or bad idea? Somebody on your team comes to you with one. An improvement, a new product, a new service. An idea.
Knowing how to deal with a bad idea, or with one that only looks bad at first, is harder than it appears, because at first glance, going on your own experience and expertise as a manager, the idea will strike you as one of five things.
| The inherited reflex | What it produces | The shift that transforms |
|---|---|---|
| Judging the idea on the spotA manager applies their own experience to an idea the moment it arrives and reaches a verdict within seconds. The verdict feels like expertise and functions as a decision nobody appealed. | A verdict on something that is not finishedAn idea can be an incomplete intuition waiting for a second one, or a proposal that fits neither the culture nor the economics. None of that makes it good or bad, and all of it makes an early verdict unsafe. | Position it before you judge itKnowing how to deal with a bad idea means placing it on two axes, whether it is plausible and whether it could ever be built, then scoring it for testing priority. Judgement waits until a prototype exists. |
There are no good or bad ideas
The five reactions are always the same, and each one arrives dressed as judgement. The idea has been tried before your colleague started here. A competitor is already doing it. It lacks originality. It costs too much to implement. It would eat too much time.
So you find yourself telling your colleague their idea has been tried already, or that you cannot see the point of it. In other words, that you think their idea is a bad one. That is a serious mistake, and there is one rule worth knowing about ideas your people bring you.
An idea can be an unfinished intuition
An idea can be incomplete and amount to no more than an intuition, an itch, which will need a second intuition before it becomes anything. That is Steven Johnson’s argument in Where Good Ideas Come From, where the slow hunch has to meet another slow hunch, sometimes years later and usually in somebody else’s head.
Kill the first hunch on arrival and you have removed one half of a pair. The person carrying the other half will never know they were holding it.
An idea can be unsuited to one of the two foundations
An idea can be unsuited to one of the two foundations of innovation. The first is your culture, and imagining a luxury house moving into fast fashion tells you how firm that constraint is. The second is whether the idea can make or save money.
Where the second condition fails, what you have is an invention rather than an innovation. That distinction does real work here, because it separates a judgement about quality from a judgement about fit.
Unsuited is a useful word and bad is not. One describes a relationship between an idea and an organisation, and the other describes the idea alone, which is exactly the information nobody has yet.
An idea is the raw form of an innovation
An idea is only the raw material of an innovation. It is the block of marble that does not yet know whether it will end up as a sculpture in a museum or as a table top in somebody’s office.
Put the three points together and the rule follows. If an idea suits your culture, it can be neither good nor bad until it has been prototyped, tested and put in front of a customer.
Which is not the end of it, because a manager still has to decide what to do with the twelve ideas currently sitting in their inbox.
How to deal with a bad idea: position it first
To complete an idea, work out its fit with your culture and your economics, and turn it into a project, I always ask whoever had it, or the group that had it, to place it in a quadrant built from two dimensions.
The reality axis
Reality asks whether the idea is plausible. Or whether it is an amusing, appealing or unsettling idea that does not answer the question you asked or fit the subject you set out to experiment on.
Note what this axis is not measuring. It is not asking whether the idea is good, and it is not asking whether anybody likes it. It asks whether the world it describes could exist.
The realisation axis
Realisation asks whether the idea could be built one day, and the timeframe deliberately stays open. Tomorrow or in ten years both count. The alternative is that the idea sits too far from your activity, your resources and the time available.
Keeping the timeframe open is what stops this becoming a feasibility study. A great deal of what an organisation eventually builds was unbuildable when somebody first described it.
Placing the idea is the work. Once somebody has to argue for a position on two axes, the conversation stops being about whether the idea is any good and starts being about what would have to be true for it to work.
Scoring ideas and trends
To refine the model and put more wood behind fewer arrows, I then score ideas to set their testing priority. The same scoring sorts trends from weak signals from passing fads, which makes it useful well beyond the original idea.
Why a high score is not a good score
The numbers below are purely indicative. An idea or trend scoring five and five is not necessarily better than one scoring zero and zero. It will be less complex to implement and demand less risk, because it has been documented extensively.
The catch sits in the same sentence. If it has been documented extensively, your competitors have very probably understood it and implemented it already.
This is the part managers find counter-intuitive, and it is the reason the scoring exists. A comfortable score describes a crowded space, and an uncomfortable one describes an empty one.
The four positions and what each one asks of you
Four positions cover the field, and each one poses a different question to whoever holds the budget. Read them as invitations rather than as rankings.
| Position | What it describes | The question it asks |
|---|---|---|
| Reality 0, realisation 0 | A genuinely strange idea that would be complex to implement | Will you dare to consider it? |
| Reality 1, realisation 3 | Easy to implement, probably judged implausible, most likely never tried by anyone | Will you go for it? |
| Reality 3, realisation 1 | Some organisations have started doing this, and academics may be researching it | Will you take the risk? |
| Reality 5, realisation 5 | Supported by established research, reassuring, and already in practice elsewhere | Will you follow? |
The second row is the one worth staring at. Easy to build, widely considered implausible, never attempted. That combination is rare, and it is where most of the available advantage sits.
The same grid separates a durable trend from a passing fad, which I work through in detail in my piece on discarding more trends than you follow.
Field note
The idea that came back three years later
A manufacturing client ran an idea scheme with a review panel, and I sat in on a session where a proposal from a maintenance technician was declined in under a minute. The reasoning was sound: it had been tried in another plant and it had not worked there.
Three years later the same organisation implemented something close to it, arriving from a consultant’s report, and treated it as new. Nobody connected the two, because the first version had been recorded as rejected rather than as parked. The technician had left by then, and I have no idea whether he ever knew.
The panel had not made a bad decision. It had made a decision at the wrong resolution, closing a file when it could have placed the idea on a grid and marked it as unbuildable under current conditions, which is a different status with a different future.
Record ideas by position rather than by verdict. Rejected is permanent and unbuildable for now is a date, and the difference between those two words is worth several years of your organisation’s time.
Which evaluation approach fits your situation
Three approaches to evaluating ideas coexist in organisations, and they produce very different behaviour from the people submitting. The right one depends on how many ideas you receive and on what you can actually resource.
Three ways to deal with a bad idea, compared
The deciding question is what happens to an idea that is not selected. Everything else about a scheme follows from that, including whether anybody submits a second one.
| Approach | What happens to an idea | Its blind spot | Fits you when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manager’s judgement on the spot | Accepted or rejected in the conversation | Closes unfinished intuitions permanently and teaches people to stop bringing them | Never, though it is the most common arrangement by a wide margin |
| Review panel with criteria | Scored against a fixed list and ranked | Rewards ideas that already resemble what the organisation does | Volume is high and the criteria genuinely reflect strategy |
| Two-axis positioning | Placed, scored for priority, and kept with its position recorded | Slower, and it requires somebody to own the parked ideas | You want the strange ones to survive long enough to be tested |
Signals that your evaluation is the problem
Four signals indicate that your evaluation method is filtering out exactly what you asked for. Each is visible in the submissions themselves.
- Every submission resembles something you already do, which means people have learned what passes.
- The same few people submit repeatedly and nobody new joins them.
- Ideas are recorded as accepted or rejected, with no third state for unbuildable at present.
- Nobody can find an idea submitted two years ago, which means the scheme has no memory and cannot pair a hunch with a second one.
Understand why the rejection felt like expertise
Your verdict arrived in seconds and felt like judgement. Read the research on why managers reject new ideas and find out what actually decided it, because it was probably not the idea.
How I can help you handle the ideas you receive
I work with managers on the ninety seconds after an idea arrives, which is where most organisations lose the ideas they later pay a consultant to bring back. The work runs from a short training session through to redesigning how an idea scheme records what it declines.
Workshops and idea scheme design
A workshop puts real submissions from your own scheme on the two axes, in front of the people who declined them. The exercise is uncomfortable and it changes the panel’s behaviour faster than any set of criteria.
Scheme design covers the third state, the parked position, and who owns reviewing it. Without an owner, parked becomes rejected within a quarter.
Keynotes and creative leadership programmes
A keynote suits an organisation whose idea scheme has gone quiet and whose leaders believe the problem is a shortage of ideas. It is almost never a shortage of ideas.
Longer programmes connect this to the four innovation strategies, since an idea’s position on the grid tells you which of the four it belongs to, and each of those needs a different working group.
Conclusion: how to deal with a bad idea without killing it
An idea arriving on your desk is unfinished by definition. It may be half of a pair, it may be unsuited to your culture or your economics, and it is certainly still raw material.
Place it on the two axes, score it for testing priority, and record its position rather than a verdict. Reserve the words good and bad for after a prototype has met a customer.
Then go looking for the second row of the table, the ideas that are easy to build and widely considered implausible. Knowing how to deal with a bad idea is mostly the discipline of not closing the file.
Frequently asked questions about handling a bad idea
How should a manager respond to an idea they think is weak?
Position it rather than judge it. Ask whether it is plausible and whether it could ever be built, and record where it lands. An idea that suits your culture cannot be good or bad until it has been prototyped, tested and shown to a customer.
What is the difference between an idea and an innovation?
An idea is raw material. An innovation suits the culture of the organisation and makes or saves money. Where the second condition fails, what you have is an invention, which is a description of fit rather than a judgement of quality.
Does a high score mean a better idea?
No. A high score means the idea is well documented and therefore easier and less risky to implement, which also means your competitors have probably already understood and implemented it. The most valuable position is easy to build and widely considered implausible.
What should happen to ideas you do not select?
Record them by position with a status of unbuildable under current conditions, rather than as rejected, and give somebody responsibility for reviewing the parked list. An unfinished intuition frequently needs a second one that arrives years later from somebody else.
