Five ways to shut down good ideas really quickly

I was invited to a collective discussion to source ideas for civic technology this week. It was a real eye opener into how difficult it can be to create the right environment for open, experimental or even workable ideas.

There’s lots of evidence already out there as to why brainstorming doesn’t work.

This doesn’t mean that sessions like the one I went to are total waste of time — they’re not, they can be stimulating, they’re great for networking, but they’re rarely productive.

If your goal is to be productive you need to build an environment that can recognise and capture an idea and let others build on it. Doing this is easier said than done, so I’m going to start with what not to do and how you might take steps to avoid this.

Here are some sure-fire ways to make sure you shut down those good ideas really quickly:

1. Forget having a clear brief of what you’re trying to do or what you want the end point to be — you’ll spend more time talking about what you should be doing than how to do it.
2. Get too many of the same kind of people in the room — people who think in the same way, are stimulated by the same things and come from the same backgrounds will have the same ideas. This is even more of a problem when you’re thinking about products for civic use rather than niche commercial products.
3. Only share ideas through talking — this will enable one kind of person to share their ideas. Paper and pens opens up another route, as do collaboration tools like Hackpad.
4. Let that talking linger in the abstract — every person will take a different interpretation and our cognitive biases will normally assume that abstract ideas serve to reinforce our own. Here be groupthink.
5. Kick out ‘bad’ ideas — if the brief is clear ideas that don’t fit that should be obvious. They simply won’t get built upon. The minute someone needs to point out that an idea is wrong or useless, defensive mechanisms kick in and any possibility of invention gets lost.

It’s too easy to slip into sessions with some or all of these problems. I’m definitely guilty of it myself.

Creating a collaborative environment where people are comfortable to share a range of different ideas in different ways is a hard thing to do. At Citizens Advice, a team might include everyone from a 20-something software engineer to a 70 year-old volunteer adviser. We have to really focus on how to make these sessions inclusive.

I’ve found prototyping the only useful way to throw ideas against a wall and help a team see what sticks. It’s tangible, there are lots of ways to share and we’re solving real world problems. You get to dead-ends or breakthrough ideas quickly and everyone can see why.