I heard somewhere that, “In order to have good ideas, you must first have many.”

Okay, so lets say you’ve found some magical way of developing ideas. You might be using techniques like those suggested by Edward de Bono, or, you might just be naturally brilliant at coming up with ideas. Now, you have a list as long as your arm of ideas, and no clue as to which one to start on first, or which ones to bin.

Maybe, you’ve put out a suggestion box and it’s full to the brim.

When confronted with something like this, quite unsurprisingly, people can become flummoxed. From a third person point of view, the situation might seem easy to handle; all too often when the pressure is on - we sometimes loose focus and fail to act.

Following, is a method you can call on when you’re stressed and need to find some focus or a starting point to begin the flow.

Being able to distinguish good and bad ideas is a very basic task. If you’re having difficulty though, and want to de-compile a large list effectively, then here’s how to do it.

First of all, lets understand what’s wrong with just deciding whether an idea is good or bad. This way of doing things will produce a large number of ideas that would be determined as acceptable, as well as ideas that are seen as being not acceptable.

Having a vast quantity of good ideas is great, but it doesn’t help you to quickly decide what idea you should work on first.

For instance, once you have gathered 30 good ideas, out of 200 hundred total ideas, you have to then decide which ones need to be started on, and which do not.

Effort, Impact and Need Scoring

This is a scoring system base on how much time and energy it would take to make something work, and how good the result could potentially be if it were successful.

Effort Score

Firstly, we give each idea (after a short chat about it’s pros and cons) a score out of 5.

It goes like this, the easier the idea is to make happen, the higher the score.

Hard Work 1 2 3 4 5 Easy Going

Impact Score

Now, we must give it a value depending on how we feel it will impact the environment the idea is enacted in. This one goes like this, the better and more positive result would be given a high score, and an idea that wouldn’t have much of an effect would be lower.

Little Impact 1 2 3 4 5 Big Impact

Need score

Finally we arrive at the score that represents common consensus. This score is used to finalise our total relating to the need for the idea to be implemented. You could score this high just because everyone wants it to happen, even though it might not have that great an impact, or may be hard to achieve.

Don’t really Need 1 2 3 4 5 Really Need

Total score

Using these three score together, will give you a very effective means of finding the most practical ideas to start on. As long as you don’t constantly just answer with 1s and 5s you should come out with a large array of different totals.

Ideas scoring 15 will be very easy to implement, well loved and have a highly positive affect on the environment it’s made effective in.

Ideas scoring 10 could be ones that would be easy, though maybe not having that much effect on where it is placed; however, the people around will greatly appreciate it. Similarly, other scores that are 10s may be very hard to achieve, but still have both a high impact on the environment and on the people involved.

Quite obviously, at the bottom of the barrel, you will find the ideas that are hard to act on; don’t have much affect on the environment or business and most people don’t even care about.

Still too many?

You have a bucket load of ideas, a have shoveled up all the rubbish and still have too many left. Maybe you’re just too good and thinking up brilliant ideas. Maybe you have three ideas that have managed to score 15 points.

Well, good for you - your options are as follows:

• Do all of them at the same time by increasing resources, people or investment.

• Change the scoring, so that each of the great ideas are scored again - but from one to ten each time.

• Change your prospective - better still, use someone else’s and get them to do the scoring.

• Or the good old ’short-strew’ method.