You Need More Bad Ideas

We talk about ideas as though they are either good or bad — binary things that you either have or you do not. But most valuable ideas are not born good. They start as something slightly wrong that gets refined into something useful.

The enemy of this process is not having bad ideas. It is not having enough ideas. When you only generate one or two options, you become emotionally attached to them because they are all you have. You defend them past the point where they deserve defending.

Linus Pauling, the Nobel-winning chemist, is supposed to have said that the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas and throw away the bad ones. The insight is not about quality filtering — it is about volume. You need a large enough pool to be able to afford to throw most of it away.

This is counterintuitive in professional settings where we are rewarded for being right and penalised for being wrong. The culture of most organisations selects against volume thinking. You are expected to arrive with your one considered recommendation, not with ten half-formed possibilities that you are still sorting through.

The irony is that the person who arrived with ten ideas and discarded nine of them probably has a better recommendation than the person who had one idea and polished it. The polishing is not the hard part. The generation is.

IdeaSpace exists partly for this reason — to be a place where ideas get written down before they get filtered. Some of them will be wrong. That is the point.