A short transcript excerpt from a YouTube conversation where a creative (Speaker A) says they have many ideas but struggle with implementation and judging their value. Stephen Shapiro responds that evaluating whether an idea is valuable is more important than immediately focusing on implementation, and proposes to address valuation first.
As a creative, I'm thinking about all these kinds of ideas. It's like I'm never at a loss for an idea. I'm at a loss to have in terms of how to implement the idea or if the idea is valuable. What would you. What advice would you give to somebody like me that it's not a loss for ideas, but doggone, a loss for the ways to implement it or determine if the idea is actually valuable?
So let's talk about the second part first, because I think to determine whether it's valuable is more important than implementation.
Okay.
Because if you are trying to implement a problem that doesn't have any value, it's sort of irrelevant. So the key to me is whatever you have as an idea, step back and always ask yourself, what is the underlying problem I'm really solving? Again, everything comes back to the question, what's the problem? And what happens is a lot of times we have questions that are really just solutions masquerading as questions, which is that idea just converted. But if you step back and say, well, what's the problem I'm really solving? Is that the right problem? Is there a better problem? So take your idea, step back in the process, and figure out what's the real problem I'm solving, and then say, well, is there a different way I can solve that problem? You might find an even better solution to the initial problem. That, to me, is the key with all of this, is that when organizations start to do these suggestion boxes, one of my beliefs is asking for ideas is a bad idea. Because everybody, if I asked you, how could you improve a company, whatever company, you would probably have, as you said, 100 ideas. Now, you multiply that by thousands or hundreds of thousands of customers. Now all of a sudden you have millions of ideas of which probably a really, really, really small fraction of them are considered valuable. So that's not efficient. You don't have an unlimited amount of time, money, or resources to be able to work on innovation. So we need to make sure we create an efficient innovation engine. And that all means coming back to not the idea, not the solution, but the question, what is it we're really trying to solve? And make sure we've taken the time to frame that properly. Pick up a copy today@invisiblesolutionsbook.com.
