Should you encourage your team to think BIG?

Sometimes it feels like incremental advances just won’t do it. You need something bigger, something new. To ensure that your team doesn’t limit themselves to just the small improvements, bug fixes, feature improvements, you tell them “Think BIG!”. This might work, but it also might have the same effect as telling them to think small.

Telling teams to think big counterintuitively puts them into a very limiting box

You may think you are taking the restraints off by saying “think big” but you may actually be putting them on. People may be more likely to evaluate their ideas along the way and ask themselves “is this big enough???” Many good ideas run the risk of being left unshared for fear of ridicule for lack of “bigness”.

Thinking big puts the focus in the wrong place

It encourages an idea first approach. An idea first approach often leads to ideas that don’t solve anything or that no one needed in the first place, even the big ideas.

Instead of telling people to think big, tell them to think broadly

Before you do that, be sure they are grounded in the current situation. The team should be very familiar with the experiences people are having, specifically what their problems and desires are. Then make sure the team understands a high level goal that is mapped to those experiences, problems and desires. Those should be the only constraints — to consider the problem and the goal. After that, encourage them to explore all kinds of ideas and solutions, big or small.

Encourage them to focus on the size of the impact not the size of the idea

People often say “think big” because they don’t want just incremental improvements. That is a valid concern, but there’s a better way to go about it. Telling a team to “think big” is too limiting.

Give your team a chance to gather context and empathy, set a high level goal and then let them surprise you with how they get there.