We are often more certain than the evidence really allows.
More quotesPeople wait for a big idea as if it were a late bus. Steinbeck’s rabbits suggest a messier arrangement.
One idea changes the questions available to the next. A checkout complaint suggests a payment fix; the fix exposes terrible error messages; those messages reveal that onboarding taught the wrong sequence. The useful result may be the fourth relative of the thought that entered first.
Instant judgement is expensive. A weak suggestion can expose a hidden constraint. An impossible one may contain a cheap mechanism. Laugh too early and the family line ends with the first rabbit.
Quantity alone produces a great deal of creative droppings. Ideas need handling. Turn one around. Apply its mechanism somewhere adjacent. Ask what becomes cheaper, faster or newly visible if it were true. Let evidence kill the bad offspring after they have had enough time to reveal whether they carry anything valuable.
The organisation usually demands the opposite: arrive with the fully formed answer, defend it immediately, attach a forecast and appear unsurprised by your own brilliance. That rewards ideas whose parents are already familiar. The strange ones look underdeveloped because they are.
Two live possibilities fed with customer behaviour, technical constraint, an irritating cost or an old solution from elsewhere may soon become twelve. On paper, they get a brief life before the forecast, budget and defensive presentation arrive. Finance can inspect the survivors after evidence has done the first cull; it does not need to stand over the mating pen.