Good ideas can come from anywhere. The best ones are usually the result of cross-pollination from seemingly disparate disciplines. Before Design Patterns were de rigeur knowledge for software engineers, they were an architectural tool. Biomimicry lets us apply proven, evolved solutions in design and engineering. Art imitates life, and vice versa. New ideas are rarely great, and great ideas are rarely new.
There are some obvious places to look for new-to-you ideas. Sabbaticals, newsletters, or even chatting about work in a social context can plant established ideas from one field in another where they may bloom afresh. Both sides of this pollination can be extremely satisfying: Finding a way to apply the wisdom of others in your own work, or seeing the gleam in someone’s eye when you explain what to you has long since become prosaic.
Ironically, the least obvious place that new ideas originate is from within your own organization, from folks ideating beyond their formal purview. (Flamin’ Hot Cheetos were not actually invented by a janitor, but wouldn’t it be great if they had been?) If, like most development teams, you use an issue tracking system, one of the best things you can do is to make sure everyone at the company can create new tickets in an incoming Triage column (assuming a Kanban-like dashboard in which columns represent stages of work). Periodically (say, once a week), folks with the authority to accept work on behalf of the team should go through any new arrivals in Triage, and respond to them thoughtfully, either adding the issue to the team’s backlog, or explaining why that’s not being done at this time.
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
—unknown, but attributed to Henry Ford
One of the saddest mistakes I see folks make with such “suggestion box” Triage columns is to delete or archive the tickets. Keep them! Keep them forever. You can certainly create a separate column—called Triaged, perhaps—but deleting suggestions is unnecessary, and sends the message that you do not value people’s ideas. Moreover, it implies that you are kiboshing their suggestion forever, which you’ll admit is an awfully long time. As long as you keep the triaged tickets around:
You can refer back to them for the rationale of why an idea was not pursued. This is surprising valuable. All too often, “new” product/eng ideas are greeted by a few old-timers who vaguely recall a similar idea already having been rejected, but cannot recall any compelling reason why
Suggestions that are rejected for lack of resources to implement them can be revisited later. Some make great intern projects, or chances for new hires to get their feet wet. Often, when an idea rattles around the back of the group’s head long enough, they realize it wouldn’t be all that difficult after all.
Team members who care deeply about a rejected idea can move tickets from Triaged back to Triage, so that they will be reconsidered. You can cap the frequency of such reversion; say, to once or twice a year. If somebody cares that much about it, maybe it really is worth reconsideration.
The poobahs who accept or reject work from the Triage column may choose to set aside one day each year for reconsidering rejected tickets. As times and people change, so do priorities and opinions. Think of it as the Big Block of Cheese Day from The West Wing. Of all the seemingly unworkable ideas, some will turn out to be like the ice-shipping scheme that earns Richard Pryor an inadvertent fortune in Brewster’s Millions.
While not every idea is worth pursuing, every idea that someone took the time to document matters to somebody, and should be treated accordingly. Sincerely welcoming ideas from all directions can help you find diamonds in the rough, and humility can help you recognize those diamonds even if they aren’t obvious at first sight. Be open, be thoughtful, and remember that sometimes, long shots pay off.