Don’t Just Make Variations on Your First Idea

Different ideas need different principles

If you’re asked to redesign a waiting room, your first idea might be to add more chairs. Your second might be to add colorful chairs, and your third, more comfortable chairs. But they all rely on the same idea: more seating. When exploring creatively, it’s useful to come up with options based on different principles too.

Try looking in four directions: change the space, change the order of steps, remove an unnecessary activity, or give people better information. For the waiting room, that could mean more precise appointment scheduling, updates on actual wait times, or a more comfortable space. These ideas are more distinct than different types of chairs.

Generate ideas first; evaluate them later. If you immediately say “That won’t work” to every proposal, the group may get stuck on the first acceptable solution. That doesn’t mean turning off your judgment forever. Once you’ve explored the options, it’s time to check costs, safety, and usability.

It can also help to set a deliberate constraint: What would we do without new software? What would change if we had half the space? Hypothetical questions aren’t a plan, but they can help you break away from familiar approaches.

Don’t measure success by the number of ideas alone. Fifteen similar variations may not be better than three genuinely different possibilities. What matters is the breadth of your thinking and the quality of the decision that follows.

Try it out: Choose an everyday problem. Come up with three options that differ in principle, not just color or size. For each one, write down what would need to change in the actual process.