Mandatory Bad Ideas and Other Good Ideas about Embracing Bad Ideas

You may have had the feeling come up during a meeting, your idea isn’t good enough, not even good enough, it’s a bad idea. However, realistically speaking, there is no such thing as a bad idea.

No idea is bad, but Risk Tolerance dictates how far out an idea can be before it’s too risky to use.

Believe in yourself to run with things and opportunities you have experience in, ideas are boats and sometimes you must throw them out to sea.

Use bad ideas as a shortcut to innovation

Make bad ideas part of your next brainstorming session. Bad ideas lead to good ideas, and the science of opposites dictates the worse an idea sounds, the greater its opposite.

4 Steps to coming up with Bad Ideas and what to do with them

1. Define Bad Ideas: Bad ideas fall between Obvious and Absurd
   • Obvious – Too boring, too single/personal.  One person’s obvious is not the same as someone else’s
   • Absurd – Too expensive, too dangerous, too far from reality

2. Require Bad Ideas as the first thing/ Not after good ideas are in place
3. Encourage What If scenarios?
   • Your problem ->What if we try…(Bad Idea)
   • Exercise in determining implementation of bad ideas as solution

4. Save bad ideas, you never know, they may indeed turn out to not be as bad as you think.