What are good ideas and what are they good for?
“Good ideas” have a bad reputatin in modern management literature. Does that mean that they are worthless? The answer is of course that “it depends on the context”.
Many conversations center about „good ideas” people have about how to tackle some thorny problem.
How to stop climate change. How to reform capitalism in order to establish social justice. How to fix the electoral system in order to prevent democracies from turning into cleptocracies.
Bad reputation
In modern management thinking though, „good ideas” have a bad reputaton.
„Good ideas are bad for innovators”, writes management guru Michael Schrage in his famous HBR article A Testable Idea Is Better than a Good Idea.
„Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics”, says an often cited military maxim, which Shrage parphrases as “Innovation amateurs talk good ideas; innovation experts talk testable hypotheses.”
Treating anything as a „testable hypothesis” is a „good idea”, for sure. Does that mean though that ideas — or strategy for that matter — are worthless?
I suggest we approach this question by first taking a good look at what we actually mean by ideas — in a good sense.
The four Ds: Data, Diagnosis, Direction, Do next
The late professor Roger Fisher was a specialist of negotiations and conflict management, serving at a time as the director of the Harvard Negotiation Project. He coauthored the negotiation bestseller Getting to Yes and other books, like Getting it Done — How to Lead When You’re Not In Charge.
Throughout his books, his main concern is how thinking and acting can lead to positive outcomes in a multilateral setting.
One of his insights is that much confusion arises from the fact that people — especially when they try to solve problems together — don’t separate the different stages of thinking.
In both the aforementioned books he introduces the “circle chart”, which separates four stages of thinking, along two axes: past vs future, and real word vs theory. In Getting it Done, the four resulting stages are called Data, Diagnosis, Direction, and Do next:
In this framework, it’s not difficult to identify the phenomenon we generally call “ideas”: they are none other, than stage 3 of this process, called here “direction”.
Armed with this knowledge, we can go back to our starting point, and put two questions, somewhat reformulated:
- How can we best utilise “good ideas”?
- How “good ideas” can be turned into “testable hypotheses”?
For the first question, the above chart alone gives the answer: “good ideas” are bad, if we try to jump right to the third stage of the thinking process, but are useful, if they are based on a correct assessment of data and a sound diagnosis, and lead to actionable next steps.
For answering the second question, the above chart is not enough, because the question leads us outside of the realm of pure thinking, to the practice of what Fisher calls learning.
He complements the four stages of thinking with a fifth one, which he calls “start doing”. The fifth stage also is the trigger point of a next cycle of thinking, and so on.
Good ideas are good, if…
So as a sumary, “good ideas” are good, if they are incorported into the four-stage cycle of thinking, leading to doing, and than to a new cycle of reflective thinking. In this way, they are at the same time “testable hypotheses”.
This conclusion is actually not so far from Shrage’s reasoning, though he sacrificed some clarity on the altar of a paradoxical catchphrase. He explains that “good ideas” are bad for organizations, which treat these ideas in isolation, and do nothing more, than trying to refine them and make them even better, without testing:
“Organizations that encouraged, talked up and celebrated good ideas were consistent — almost pathological — innovation underachievers. To be sure, there was serious discussion, debate and analysis around good ideas and how to make them better. But the actual outcomes typically underwhelmed and underperformed, as in “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” These firms, teams, and groups made improving good ideas central to their innovation effort.”
And further down:
“But what’s the accountability for a good idea? The fact that a lot of people think it’s a good idea? That’s a popularity contest.”
The phenomenon he describes here, is an existing one. Steve Blank, another managmeent and tartup guru, calls it “innovation theater”.
