How to Keep Your Best Ideas from Going Down in Flames

How do you decide if an idea for your business is a good idea or a bad idea? Do you look at the idea and decide based on your gut reaction? Or do you make an effort to "look at both sides of the issue" by listing the pros and cons as you see them? Both of these approaches are popular and you can find plenty of successful people who will claim their success comes from regular application of either method. From my vantage point, there are serious problems with both approaches. I have a better alternative for you, one that is particularly powerful when working in a group.

Successful people tend to think that their decisions have always been good ones. Isn't it funny that when we're successful we attribute our success to hard work or some other virtue, but when we fail, we often think that we merely had "bad luck?" Those who say they make their decisions in business based on common sense may simply be those who were favored by luck. The gut instinct or common sense approach to evaluating a new idea is a mental trap. Keep this in mind: you can't cure a problem with the same level of thinking that created it.

Listing the pros and cons of an idea seems like a balanced approach, one that is guaranteed to tell us if an idea that looks good on the surface actually has a weakness that will cause us problems later on. The difficulty with this approach is that it invariably is a judgment exercise. If we're generally in favor of an idea, we list as pros only those things we already believe support it. Then we have difficulty listing many cons. The result is not a balanced, objective test at all. As Robert Frost once said, "Thinking isn't agreeing or disagreeing. That's voting."

Instead, let me suggest a way to evaluate ideas that turns the evaluation into a true exploration of the value of the idea. This approach is called PMI, for Plus, Minus, and Interesting. Here's how it works.

How to Do a PMI

Let's say you've met with your staff to generate ideas for a new sales campaign. You think a particular idea is superior to all the rest. To test this idea, you do a PMI scan. First, you challenge yourself (or a team if you're working with a group) to scan your mind in the positive direction for one minute and list as many pluses about the idea as you can. Write these down. Next, switch gears and challenge yourself to list as many minuses about the idea as you can in one minute. Finally, scan the idea for things that are merely "interesting" and don't easily fall into the plus or minus categories. What's very powerful about the "I" part of the mental scan is that you find yourself reacting to the interest that resides in the idea and not just your judgmental feelings about it.

The essential element here is challenging yourself to scan your mind for as many possible items to list in the plus, minus and interesting categories as you can. It's important to just list them and move on without making any further judgments. Enforcing a time limit of one minute helps you avoid making judgments. What makes this approach work better than listing pros and cons is that now your intelligence is focused not on evaluating the idea but on discovering as much as you can about its positive, negative, and interesting features. You're no longer simply voting with your judgment but exploring the real nature of the idea. You're thinking instead of reacting. 

Earlier I mentioned that this approach works very well in a group. Here's why. When we discuss new ideas in a group, those who agree with an idea initially are the ones who end up listing all the pros. Those who initially disagree are the ones who find all the cons. Nobody looks at the neutral, or interesting, part of the idea. At the same time, nobody has challenged his own reaction to the idea, so everyone is merely registering their gut reactions.

When you do a PMI scan as a group, everyone is forced to explore and consider the idea from multiple angles. Invariably, everyone finds pluses and minuses they hadn't considered and so the idea gets a much more balanced evaluation. Further, when the Interesting scan is completed, you may find that the idea leads you to places you never would have imagined otherwise.

The mental discipline of the PMI approach is especially helpful when you think you know the value of an idea and think there's no reason to explore it any further. Putting your mind to the task of discovering what's good, bad, and interesting about an idea gives you more of the evidence you need to make a balanced evaluation of the idea than any other approach I know.

Try a PMI the next time you think you have a good idea, and let me know how it goes. 

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