How to get the perfect idea ?

By Maxime Marchionno February 11, 2019 Edition CHIC 2018-2019Discover AKANE project

Dear readers,

Wow what a click-bait title. Buzzfeed get out that body. Ok. So. Let’s be serious.

I think it’s the right time to unleash our way to make decisions. As everybody is going to have to make some hard ones in a near future. It’s easy to have ideas but how does our team manage to get through the process of selecting one “final” idea ?

As you may know, we had difficult time to converge on one idea. We even diverged. A lot. Com’on it’s so easy to get new ideas and to get lost in our thoughts. Everyone is good at it. Because of the different deadlines we were forced to develop a method to make choices. This text is inspired from our retrospective essay.

The fact is that we are too diplomatic. Things are said but we tried to make everyone happy. Because of a bunch of other very good reasons. But when it comes to decision making, diplomacy is somehow imperfect. I mean… Syria… Fortunately that OTAN and Russia have meet in Geneva to discuss about the peace in this poor country. What a shame! We needed to spend less time at converging and finding a way to keep our horizontal way of chatting. So we used politics-inspired way to get them. Please don’t say it. No it won’t be a another stupid article about how “House of Cards” represents perfectly the politics. It’s serious stuff here.

The first step will be always explaining each solution. Here are the tools :

  • The “super-enhanced french” democracy tool: Having 5 votes. Voting. Making a second turn. Choosing between the middle half most voted. Voting again. If necessary, making other turns.
  • The “UN” veto tool: every members has an infinite veto and can use it every time for no reason.
  • The “swiss democracy” discussion tools : Consensus.
  • The “hunger games” elimination tool: Each idea gets a debate if one members don’t like, he/she kills it.

With those instruments how did we do ?

  1. We used the democracy tool to get the first ideas, it was a disaster everyone was not happy with the final idea. The idea was fine but choosing for the least bad is not the best idea (look at France now !). We ended with an alarm clock…
  2. So we decided to use the UN veto tool to cross out the subject that the members really don’t like (it’s was mainly taboo subjects such as sexuality or death).
  3. Then we used the swiss tool to get a consensus and join similar ideas and get a consensus (our final idea was a consensus between open-plan office, sound cancelling furniture, distributed sensors and imaging).
  4. Then we proceeded with the elimination tool, we discussed each idea asking and trying to convince people. If the idea was not clearly put apart we moved to the other and discussed it later.

In the last phase we put a strong need on the problematic addressed. It’s why we elude a lot of fancy projects. When you got the idea, the problematic, the insights and the needs of the market will drive to a quick convergence to a solution.

We hope that our politics approach will help you to get a correct idea. You noticed my nuance, perfection is sadly impossible to reach.

Good luck with your projects. See you Saturday.

ZZ team with <3