10 Reasons your ideas suck (Copy)

It’s not so much that they sucked when they started out.

It’s not that they contained no greatness within them.

It is mostly what you did with them afterward, that turned them from good to caca.

I am a believer that good ideas come from everywhere and all over. I also believe that creative teams and creatively minded people are geared and trained in a way that allows them to access thinking and perspectives that genuinely produce original ideas – things that most people may not have thought of.

But that is not where it stops. We certainly are ALL CAPABLE OF CREATIVITY. If we weren’t, we’d likely have shuffled off this mortal coil or found ourselves living in an isolated hut somewhere waiting for hungry wildlife to devour us. The very act of living itself is a creative art.

When it comes to creativity – which is really just the ability to create connections between things not readily apparent – it takes courage to be bold, different and take chances. There is, however; something in our human makeup and the way we run in crowds that can disrupt this flow – that can interfere with creativity’s fullest effect.

This is why what might have started out as a good idea got turned into a mediocre one, or even a bad one, along the way.

The top 10 reasons your ideas suck

1. Don’t believe in yourself

Based on past performance, the ideas your team come up with seem lack-lustre so you've gone into this challenge with that subtle, deep-down belief that you're not very good at 'big ideas'. Well then, 'keep doing what you always did, keep getting what you always got'. Confidence is a tricky thing. At the very least you and your team must believe that it is possible. Otherwise you are doomed to mediocrity from the start.

2. Tried too hard

In fearful anticipation of what people might say, you tried to cover every single aspect of the idea. In the course of that ,you ended up forcing pieces that don’t belong together. Not every idea can serve every objective, or audience. In trying to make it tick every box, you ended up warping your beautiful idea into a misshapen deformity.

3. Didn’t try hard enough

You went with the first idea and didn’t explore any further. You bought into your own brilliance on the first try OR you are so confident in how creative you are, that you lost perspective. A lot of people have good ideas. You and your team did not corner the market on creativity – even if you have excelled in the past. Humility is a good foundation for great thinking.

4. Creation by Committee

Creativity is not a democratic endeavour. While good ideas come from anywhere and it is good to open up your creative process, this never means that everyone involved gets a vote. When a big group of diverse people try to develop ideas as a collective, the ideas that result are mutations and I’ve seen loads of good ones get left behind on the cutting room floor.

5. Not knowing when to stop

There’s a wisdom that some kindergarten art teachers follow. Knowing when to get the kids to stop adding to their artwork. There is a tendency to overdo. To add something to an already good idea and thus take it away from its core. You’ve taken a good thing and changed it for the worse by trying to make it better.

6. Frankenstein

All of us in the agency world are very familiar with the process by which clients will take parts of different ideas and ask us to mash them together. The end result is sometimes a freak of nature that was never intended because we avoided making a choice. It’s ironic because part of the creative process is doing just that – combining different ideas or changing things that have been done before by altering certain elements. But the Frankenstein is a different kind of monster.

7. Copy-cat syndrome

It is not impossible to use ideas that have gone before as a starting place for a new idea. One of my favourite creative exercises is to pick ideas from other categories and brands and ask how we might redesign them to fit our situation. The difference being that this is just an exercise that uses the original idea as a spark rather than trying to clone it. It’s like being that kid who copies last year’s winning science fair exhibit, rationalizing ‘it was good enough to win last year’. The problem is the judges have already seen it – last year!

8. Too trendy

This is all about timing. If your idea is on a trend that is just about to hit that fat part of the adoption curve – not too early and definitely not too late – then you might have a really successful concept on your hands. Otherwise you are looking at a scenario where you’ll be too far ahead of your time or, just as bad, so late that you’re just part of the crowd.

9. Stress-Testing (not the same as Devil’s Advocate)

You know that person in the room who starts every negative critique with ‘just playing Devil’s advocate’? The truth, most of the time, is that it is easier to destroy than it is to build. It has always been as such and some people really cannot help looking for flaws in everything. This is not to be confused with a good constructive Stress-Test. A good stress test should be near the final stage of development of the idea. This is where we come at it from various points of view and ‘walk it through’ to identify any weaknesses or potential risks. The effort is to construct the idea to be as strong in all these areas as possible without bastardizing it, nor striving for unattainable perfection. There are no perfect ideas but a good stress test will help make your chosen one be as strong as possible.

10. You backed too far off

Another of my creative exercises is to come up with a crazy-huge, absolutely nutty idea and then back it off in increments until it becomes a feasibly great idea. The danger here is in going too far in the ‘backing off’ direction. A good idea should be kind of scary. It should upset you just a little bit and make you worry. You have to retain some if this edge, even as you smooth out the rough corners. Too many times, we take a fantastic idea and water it down in our efforts to avoid being too disruptive. Great ideas should be risky. There are other ways to manage risk without diminishing your good idea.

11. (Bonus) The idea is not easy to explain

Another thing that happens is related to that beautiful Einstein quote ‘If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough’. Sure it’s your idea but in a way, maybe you haven’t fully understood it yet. You have to keep working at distilling it to its most brilliant essence so that you can explain it to others. This takes several rounds of going over and over it. 'The story of your idea’ is way more important than the idea itself at this critical early stage.