Prioritising Ideas

Why?

One of the probable outcomes of taking deliberate action to surface ideas within your organisation is that they will pour out! Sounds great? It is, but this is when people can feel overwhelmed.

It’s sensible to review your ideas against a prioritising framework. Put simply, to set a quick-fire criteria and hold all ideas accountable to it. This will leave you with a smaller number ideas to drive forward and the confidence to park others for a while.

How?

1. Decide on criteria that checks against what impact you’re really looking to see. Keep this really simple (3-5 points max) and allow it to be such that you can ‘rinse’ ideas through these quick checkpoints to see what comes out as strongest. This might be a blend of internal and external impact. For example, during our Intrapreneurship Programmes we are often looking for ideas that clearly demonstrate ‘new thinking’ that maybe wouldn’t get funding from other places without the opportunity to test. This really helps decision makers to ask themselves, “is this the right fit?”

2. Use your criteria to spot blind spots. The criteria can be really helpful for the ‘owner’ of the idea as they can answer any questions about their solution and won’t be at a disadvantage if they just weren’t able to articulate something off the cuff. Either let them know criteria before they put their idea forward or bring them to the prioritising process to let them help you understand their thinking more.

3. Categorise and prioritise all of the ideas:

• Let’s do it - the idea really speaks to the criteria and has a feel of ‘why aren’t we already doing this?’
• Let’s leave it - this may be a good idea, but our context and criteria just don’t fit.
• Let’s shape it - the idea shows potential but needs to think about the criteria it doesn’t meet and consider what modifications would increase the value.
• Let’s park it - the idea has real merit, but the conditions aren’t right for it just now. We’ll revisit this later.
• Be careful though, some of the best ideas we have seen were once rough diamonds, overlooked because their value was not immediately obvious, so look hard to spot untapped potential.