There Really is Such a Thing as a “Bad Idea”

How many times have you heard someone say “There’s no such thing as a bad idea?” This is a regularly stated before brainstorming sessions. Its intent is noble: to create a safe place for people to verbalize their ideas and to express their creativity. While I am in complete support of eliminating fear from the workplace (at home, too!), this statement usually precedes an exercise in futility – brainstorming without a clear objective – which leads to generating a lot of bad ideas.

Albert Einstein said, “If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and only 5 minutes finding a solution.” That may seem extreme, but he understood that the quality of our solutions is directly related to how well we define the problem.

Generating ideas without first clearly identifying the customers’ important unmet needs is like shooting arrows without first sighting the target. And increasing the number of ideas you blindly generate isn’t going to significantly improve your chance of hitting the target. There’s an old adage that “A problem well-defined is half-solved.” Similarly, “A customer need well-defined is half-satisfied.”

Most companies don’t lack creativity; they lack focus. They don’t lack ideas; they have plenty of ideas. What they lack is clarity about what customers’ want, about where the market is unmet. In truth, the best creativity trigger is a well-defined customer need.

Any idea that is not focused on an important unmet need is a bad idea. Any idea that is focused on an important unmet need is a good idea.