Converging on Top Ideas
Choosing is harder than generating, and doing it by show of hands rewards whoever spoke last. This lesson covers converging deliberately: what to select on, and how to keep a promising odd idea alive through the cut.
After this lesson you can
- Run a selection that is not decided by whoever pitched most confidently.
- Vote against more than one criterion, so the safe idea is not the only survivor.
- Carry a long shot forward openly rather than smuggling it through.
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The film runs two or three minutes. Everything else on this page is open.
Module Overview
Choosing is often harder than generating, and the film gives you three tools plus the traps that come with them. For a quick decision, dot voting gives you a heat map of what the team likes. It has two failure modes: snowballing, where the first few votes attract the rest, and a drift to the safe middle that quietly kills the daring ideas.
Two fixes for that. Vote blind, writing your choice on a card and adding the dots all at once. And appoint a guardian of originality with special voting rights, whose job is keeping the wilder ideas alive.
When you need more structure, an impact and effort matrix plots ideas against effort on one axis and impact on the other: chase low effort and high impact, park high effort and low impact. An ambition matrix asks a different question, which is how far you are trying to go, sorting ideas into incremental (better at what you already do), evolutionary (a new feature, or an existing offer for new people) and revolutionary (something new for someone new). Whichever you use, remember prototyping is next and ideas keep changing there. It is far easier to bring a wild idea down to earth than to inject inspiration into a safe one after the fact.
Where this usually goes wrong
- A show of hands, where the first few decide the rest.
- Selecting on “best”, which a group hears as “most deliverable”.
- Overruling the vote for your own favourite, which teaches the room that the vote was decorative.
Check it landed
3 questions, and one of them has no right answer. You get the reasoning either way.
What is wrong with choosing by a show of hands?
Why select against more than one criterion, rather than just picking the best ideas?
One odd idea got no votes, and you cannot stop thinking about it. What do you do?
Sign in to answer these and see the reasoning behind each one.
Put it to work
4 templates go with this lesson. Each one has its own guide on when and how to use it.
