A Good Idea About Good Ideas
My guess is that you aren’t short of ideas about how to grow your organization, expand your work, or increase your impact. The challenge is in figuring out which ideas are worth pursuing next and how to do it.
One of my clients (LiveDifferent) is having me guide a process of exploring what they call Strategic Conversations to explore ten new initiatives or potential expansions. The approach we’re taking is totally new for me, and it’s getting really interesting results so far.
When I saw the list of ideas I instinctively began evaluating them and was ready to eliminate 2-3 before even getting started. They were too divergent, too far beyond our current operations, too expensive, or too far outside our core mission. I felt good about so quickly narrowing the project.
Until the CEO told me that wasn’t the assignment.
In what I initially thought was a mistake, Charles Roberts made it clear that every one of these ideas had been approved by the board as a concept worth significant exploration and the goal isn’t to eliminate any of them but to bring a full report on what it would take to accomplish each of them. We’re not looking for reasons to dismiss them, we’re identifying the pathways needed for each to succeed.
This requires a different mindset.
Strategy sessions sometimes start with blue sky thinking but by the time specific ideas are being considered we’ve shifted well into the pragmatism of known limits and scarce resources. We’re trying to cut things away.
In this approach we treat each idea as valid and work to creatively build ways to make them work. The ideas we are generating so far are better than I hoped for and we’re finding fascinating potential in ideas I wanted to dismiss.
Give it a try.
Take a few innovative ideas that seem far fetched or out of alignment and suspend those critiques for a bit to push for what it would take to make them succeed.
Or, if you want to be even bolder; reverse the process and look at all your current operations and examine what would make them unworthy of continuing.
It’s very early in this process with LiveDifferent. Eventually there will be decisions where some of these ideas will be taken on, others held for the future, and (I expect) some removed from consideration. But for now I’m happily surprised by how energizing it is to try to figure out how to make each one work.
There’s something exciting about being challenged to go further down trails that don’t look appealing at the start and find they lead to very interesting places.