What you’ll learn
- The four-round filter that turns 380 raw ideas into about 15 proposals, without losing the good ones
- Effort–impact grids, weighted matrices and Pugh analysis, each taught with real numbers
- How to check the winners for risk and group them into options, each with a named champion
What you’ll produce
By the end of this module you’ll have a screened, scored and ranked shortlist of ideas. Free templates:
From the module
The morning after: 380 sticky notes and a decision to make
The creative day went well. The wall holds 380 ideas: brilliant ones, silly ones, duplicates, and a few that would get someone fired. Now what? Two failure modes wait for you here. Analysis paralysis: trying to deep-study all 380, running out of steam by idea 60, and quietly picking the familiar ones. Gut-feel sorting: the chief engineer walks along the wall and keeps what they already liked, which makes the whole Creative phase pointless. The Evaluation phase avoids both with a filter of four rounds. The first rounds are quick and cheap, and each one gets more careful as the list gets shorter. About one idea in eight makes it to development. That's normal.
Continue reading in Module 6, or read the related guide: Idea-Generation Techniques.