Wanna hear my small idea? No great pitch has ever opened with this line. Big ideas, Moonshot Ideas, Never Been Done Before Ideas (NBDBs) have become the currency of creative companies everywhere. But why do all ideas have to be big anyway?
The short answer is that they don’t. It’s just that in cool, creative industries, we’re allergic to small ideas. Is it because we associate small ideas with the algorithm? Or is it because you can’t charge as much for “small”? Or is it because they don’t get you on the front cover of the magazine?
Small ideas that are big ideas.
But did you know there is this whole other thing called a big, small idea? And these take us pretty far. Take the handle. One of the most important big, small ideas of all time. Discovering sharpened flint as a cutting tool was a breakthrough, but adding a handle? Well that was a small improvement on the ax that magnified our strength by multitudes. Or take the Model T? Moving from a horse to a car was a true innovation, but incremental improvements on the Model T have taken us all the way to a Tesla.
When impact exceeds effort.
There’s nothing more satisfying than solving a problem in the smallest possible way. When your impact far exceeds the effort put in. I once worked for a high end beauty store that had an intimidation problem. It was so fancy, so beautifully and cleanly designed that when people walked in the door they were scared to touch anything. We need a “big idea,” they said. It turns out they needed a table. Because when you walk into an intimidating space, being able to browse a table immediately gives you something to do. A few years later, I worked on a project for the Obama White House tackling bullying of APOC children. We were going to launch the new frontier of anti-bullying ideas. But we didn’t. Because the most impactful start to this initiative was simply taking all the amazing resources that currently existed and translating them into the languages spoken at home. A handle? A table? Getting the right information into the right language? All big, small ideas.
Knowing the difference between a big idea and a small idea may be the most underutilized skill in the creative industry, at great cost to our bottom lines and our weekends. Because when you’re always chasing the big, you're always in the land of high risk and high investment. Why go through all that if you don’t have to?
“DISCOVER” and “DEVELOP” ideas?
Evolutionary psychologists actually credit our exceptionalism with our ability to think in both big and small ways. Except they don’t talk about it in terms of big and small (which makes small, well…small), but rather a DISCOVER and a DEVELOPMENT mindset.* You need to discover new resources, but then you need to develop them to unlock their full potential. Perhaps our allergy to small thinking is as simple as a language problem? “DISCOVER” and “DEVELOP” ideas anyone?
Regardless of what we call them. We need both. To balance out the gravitational pull of the big, perhaps the most provocative thing we can do is to seek out the small? Or as they say in the weightlifting world to balance out the big torso, “don’t forget leg day.”
Source: Psychology Today