Truth-skewing is an inevitable result of over-simplification, which is exactly what a big-versus-small debate is. The world isn’t made of clear-cut opposites and as Glyn suggests, combining, rather than comparing is probably a more sensible approach.

This post is an attempt to insert some important nuance into the conversation. Still, to keep it manageable, it’s in neat sections:

Despite these two worlds merging, product development and advertising remain very different worlds. Although many of us are necessarily involved in both, considering the ideas in this (or any similar) post from one perspective will result in different conclusions to doing so from the other. This is an important caveat for any all-encompassing statement about creativity or strategy.

If you’re not sure if your project is product- or marketing-centric, ask yourself this simple question: is its success being judged on its first month in the wild, or every month except the first?

Big thinking does not start when your agency is briefed. There are people working directly for the business you’re trying to help who have been ‘thinking big’ way before you ride into town. They will have been considering the company’s ambitions, marketplace opportunities and changing customer behaviour for months and years. If you don’t have these people in the room, then you should question how much affect your work is likely to have on the core business at all.

If your agency has talent and experience, then your team will also have been considering some of the associated challenges for a long time. Day zero passed a long time ago.

Lean practitioners talk about beginning with your Plan A: the thing you *think* is your big vision. It might have been bubbling inside you for years. While it will probably change, it is a brilliant tool to kick-start the process.

In short: ‘big thinking’ isn’t limited to the normal three weeks of intensive, isolated consideration. See slow hunches.

If a person has a big ‘idea’ which is never acted on, it’s irrelevant. So the idea itself is not the most important bit. Only big change matters, and that can start from ideas of any ‘size’.

It’s worth noting that if a creative company makes money from the generation of ‘ideas’ then it is in its interest to glorify the conception of ‘the idea’. But an inevitable danger of glorifying the idea is that the ‘story’ becomes more important than the reality. I’ve witnessed many companies mythologise a ‘big idea’ to the point that its actualisation becomes less important than convincing people it’s true. Advertising is very good at making myths palpable, and actually influencing consumers to feel that they’re true. But when you do this to your own staff it’s fairly dangerous. I’d share some stories of this, but I would receive some angry emails tomorrow. I’m sure you have your own.

Being story-obsessed is also a surefire way to think short-term, always looking for this week’s news story that keeps the narrative alive.

Don’t get caught up in the birth of ‘the idea’ - know its strengths and its limitations. Focus on the size of the impact you’re trying to make and get there in the most effective way. Ambition as something to aim for, not something to commoditise.

I have a friend who deliberately plays down his ideas to increase the chances he can get them out of the door. When an idea is inflated too much, a big budget assigned and lots of eyes on it, it’s far more likely to be stopped. It becomes a big deal, has high potential, so must need MORE TIME and BIGGER DECISIONS!

This isn’t just a point about the perceived ‘size’ of an idea (which I’d like to think I’ve already pooh-poohed as a concept), but about how much attention and pressure it’s given; how much hopeful value it has assigned to it before it’s had a chance to prove itself.

I’m not saying smaller ideas are better, of course. That would be a meaningless statement.

Having been at Made by Many for one year, I’m not surprised that there is so much confusion about the role of visionary thinking in processes like ours. Even we are terrible at explaining it.

Below is a diagram we sometimes show clients. And it’s incredibly misleading...

What I think the diagram wrongly implies is this: We’re going to come up with loads of ‘ideas’ really fast, push the best of them through rapid user-testing cycles, whittling down the list to the one thing users tell us you should make. *Shudder*

This makes it sound like a scattergun approach where we hurl stuff at users until they say they like something. You’ll be relieved that this isn’t accurate at all. It’s our own gross over-simplification that was designed to give clients a quick, loose idea of some of the tasks that will take place over the next few weeks. I.e. We’ll start with loads of propositions and end with one.

What follows is what we’re likely to say when we don't show the diagram. It is the actual truth (and guess what, it’s longer and messier)...

i. After some intense research and collectively outlining the situation, objectives and risks, we’re going to get in a room with key members of your business that can directly influence the development of your product. There will be decades of experience in the room with enough knowledge and creativity to fuel a dozen visions. Potential strategies will be explored as a group, based on our shared experiences and hypotheses.

ii. We will identify customer needs we think are worth solving with the aim of approaching solutions that will help address the agreed objectives and interrogate the proposed strategies. We’ll then choose the most important, fertile areas to focus on.

iii. Collectively and quickly, we will explore literally hundreds of potential propositions through sketching. Sketching forces everyone to stop talking, and to think like a user: everyone involved bounces ideas off each other openly and publicly, thinks practically and expresses propositions as customer experiences, instead of conceptually. Some sketches will be visionary projections, others will be small features, but together they form a mix of tangible ingredients to get customer feedback.

iv. From here, we will cluster the sketches and identify compelling areas and gaps (things we’ve overlooked). The most promising propositions (that fix real problems and address high priority business objectives) are turned into simple prototypes to put in users’ hands.

vi. User testing - at the proposition stage - gives us an immediate sense of what resonates with people, but most importantly what not to focus on...

It’s worth taking a breath here to explain something especially important: We are not necessarily testing ‘whole ideas’ here. One of the biggest flaws in that diagram up there is that it insinuates we devise lots of candidates for ‘the winning idea’ and through this process the ‘killer’ idea is chosen and honed. This would be MADNESS. This misconception is partly a hang-up from a more traditional creative process and partly just our human need to simplify. But it is not the truth. These propositions are not necessarily contenders for the idea at all; they are idea ‘fragments’, used to provoke responses from which we can move towards the right solutions. Let’s continue...

vii. Testing prototypes highlights which problems/solutions customers identify with, which features appeal to them, what kinds of interactions feel natural and what device or situation is the most appropriate for a solution. Even testing a very specific feature might simply surface a bigger need - a need to which an alternative set of features might be a better solution. The ‘final’ proposition(s) might end up being something completely different to anything currently on the table.

viii. The next few rounds of prototyping and testing will see us iterating solutions based on feedback and continuously adapting the business model to sharpen the vision and direction. We don’t mindlessly do everything users say; there is a skill to understanding which cues to follow. [That’s a post in itself]

ix. As we move from a heaving smorgasbord of propositions to perhaps one or two lead propositions, the transition can be seen retrospectively to be a messy mutation. Solutions are usually clean only in hindsight, making a neat plan towards a crisp solution seem suspicious by comparison.

x. We end up with a clear strategy and product(s) forged from pieces of visionary thinking, aligned tightly to business objectives and validated as solving genuine customer problems.

Right.

So that paints a much better picture of our process. And hopefully explains why the ‘size’ of an idea has little to do with how much time was dedicated to birthing it in isolation. Extended thinking periods without validation can waste huge amounts of time - more so, the longer-term your intentions are.

When all is said and done, I am in full agreement with the thrust of Pats’ article: that visionary leaps are vital to disrupting marketplaces. But just as the gaps left by ‘leaping’ need filling in, so too do the gaps that open up when we reduce complex processes to binary opposites... or reductive diagrams!

I revert to my favourite quote: “If you can’t say it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” So until we’ve all really resolved these things, perhaps saying it simply is not the most useful thing any of us can do. And that, my friends, is a neat way to excuse myself for a very long post ;)

**update**

Since this post went live, @madebymany tweeted that this was a response to Pats’ post "about Lean vs Big ideas”. Pats correctly pointed out that this was not what her post was about at all. She’s right - and neither is this post about that. Just shows how easy it is to slip back into soundbites and start distorting the point again. Naughty @madebymany. (Tim says he’s sorry!)

Pats added: “That big ideas and lean methods are compatible is kind of my point.” Which helps to bring this post back to my point: This sentence alone is in danger of implyingthat big thinking belongs to a separate world than Lean methods. It’s exactly this kind of thing that I believe is worth addressing in greater detail, because loose terminology helps to propagate some of the myths that I address above. Lean methodology involves ‘big thinking’, the definition of which I hope I’ve agitated. Not to argue an opposing view, but to explore its nuances.

If I still haven’t made myself clear I might have to give up this blogging lark ;)

LET’S ALL LOVE EACH OTHER x