Crummy ideas are the seeds of great ones
I have been looking into the future and trying to form a vision. I work mostly with the “how” - The “how work will work” in the future. Sometimes I feel that is even tougher than imagining products of the future.
I keep running into the problem that we talk of abstract concepts when we try to form visions. We too often talk in generalisation. “Ai will transform how we work”. “Data-informed is what we need become”. The list of examples goes on. The problem of course is my brain cannot relate that easily enough to any of the real work we do today. The problem is twice as bad for the future. For the future, you need to first imagine the world of tomorrow and then relate the concept to the world as it will stand then.
Try this out for yourself. Imagine “data-informed excellence in the Ai-world”. Your brain will just give up. Working memory runs out. You would need to grapple with the concept for a a few days to form any wiring in your brain to make your own mental model for this great concept.
I even made this into a meme.
The abstract and general does not stick at the start of the visioning work.
Go for the crummy examples
The crummy and hasty examples are the antidote to generalisation.
Imagine how data informed could work in real life in the future. Imagine how an LLM could crunch through your actual sales data. Then imagine using a magic wand to create a segmented report with recommendations per segment. And of course, replace this example with anything in your own domain.
Create 5 more examples. Ask for hot takes of what future might be from your colleagues. Hold an ideation session. The aim is not to create the right idea. The aim is to create examples. The work is to create the basis for further work.
Ok. You might get lucky and find something really good. But don’t count on it.
Your brain feeds of examples - output is better examples
Think of a good conversation with a good sparring partner. You give context and ideas. You get something related but better back.
Your brain is great at similarity and complementing. “Not that idea exactly but how about this one?”; “Won’t that mean that also this effect will happen?”
Now this is something that can be made into a system. The improvement is pretty much guaranteed. Examples spark ideas of slightly better ideas. Then you have more examples. The thing is that this all needs constant work. Repeated effort is must.
Back to the segmented sales report idea. What should the recommendations included be? What would be cool? What would make our operations twice as fast? “Oh - if we had that, then we might be able to X, Y, Z”. That phenomenon there is just then the brain applying what it is best at.
Back to the crummy ideas. They are the seeds of a proper tree trunk of vision. And the vision is not really a living organism like a tree. A vision to me is more like a tree made of Lego-bricks. You have to keep finding pieces that fit in. You build the detail of the vision by adding pieces.
Make the pieces. Put the tree together. Get feedback. Test the whole for traction. Take the concept apart. Rebuild. Rinse and repeat.
Great ideas are not found out of the blue. Great visions are not born at once. The great ones are grown from the roots and trunk of the crummy ideas.
Don’t mind the mediocre ideas. Don’t mind the bad ideas. I suppose the normal distribution is at play again. Only few ideas make up the far edge of the excellence curve. To find the great ideas, keep the examples of the future coming. Have ideas bounce off each other.
Your imagination feeds off the crummy ideas of future.