The Big (Uneasy) Idea(s)

In contrast to what some people say, having ideas is not easy. Creativity is not a commodity – it is a rare gift and a scarce resource. People who have the ability to come up with ideas – those kinds of ideas that spark genuine excitement – and to generate them consistently, are very hard to find.

The "wisdom of crowds" may breed a significant amount of ideas because it reaches a mass critical enough to include some key idea people in it, but the creativity of micro-crowds, smaller groups of alleged creative thinkers, is frequently exaggerated. Think of the workshops and brainstorming sessions you've participated in recently, and you will have to admit that idea generation rarely is a collective effort. In contrast to idea qualification, the aggressive filtering of ideas through educated commentary and feedback, the Eureka moment, can most often be attributed to one single person. I love this line about conventional ad agencies from the website of boutique agency School of Thought: "Every meeting had ten people, when two would have sufficed. We were those two."

Idea people usually become entrepreneurs; people who think they have ideas (but don’t really do) love to participate in brainstorming sessions. But all they really do is become experts in the ideation process – in other words, they become adept at managing the generation of a lot of mediocre ideas rather than producing a single big one. Mind-mapping, flow charts, association techniques, and "lateral thinking" typically produce a vast number of creative associations and document them well but that cannot preclude the fact that only a few (really good) ideas eventually survive this process.

And yet, companies continue to launch innovation centers and idea forums. They gather hundreds or thousands of assumed idea generators only to generate ideas that truly creative people have already had. I cannot tell you how much time I've seen wasted in the evaluation process of ideas that seemed big at the beginning and then began to lose their appeal the longer they were analyzed. This time is crucial, don't squander it – while your organization spends months on due diligence and research, entrepreneurs and start-ups are already moving to make these very ideas real. They are the ones who rapidly prototype while you just demonstrate the stereotypical inertia of a big organization. If someone has an idea, let him or her run with it.

Now, you may argue that the age of big ideas is over (as Alain de Botton does in this recent BBC Radio 4 interview). He's referring to the big ideologies, the grand narratives and assumptions that shape our time and determine the intellectual discourse – and he has a point. But on a less philosophical level, I would argue that ALL ideas need to be big in order to be ideas. Or, to put it differently, even small ideas need to FEEL big in the moment they're presented. The world of ideas does not know the principle of relativity. Relativity is a department, or better, a division of the left brain, an analytical act that classifies ideas. Ideas, in their essence, are absolute. It is the qualification, the analytical examination, that divides them into small and big ones. And maybe the biggest ideas are the ones that enable ideas, as many as possible – crowd-sourcing, the Internet are such examples.

Note that what is arguably the world's most prominent forum for ideas, the annual TED conference, does not conduct group ideation activities – what it does is present individuals and their ideas to a broader community and make sure that these ideas "spread" and ultimately become a reality. Having ideas remains a lonely act. Most people have the ability to see the practical limitations to ideas. Rare are those who have the ability to see the future despite the practical limitations of today. They're called visionaries.