You can see what something could become before you fully understand what you mean by it.
Whether you are developing a product for an established brand or building something new, your knowledge, experience, and reference points may already give you enough context to imagine a creative expression of that possibility.
That does not necessarily mean you understand enough of the idea to decide that this is what you intend to pursue.
Before you can bring that idea into the innovation process, you have to understand what you have recognized well enough to decide what you are proposing:
This is what I think, and this is what I mean by it.
The difference between knowing what you think and understanding what you mean by it contains more thinking than the innovation process often makes explicit.
Your Creative Vision Needs More Than Conviction
Your creative vision, creative point of view, and creative benchmarks give your imagination a more developed basis for considering what could exist.
Eventually, the relationships within what you are imagining begin to make enough sense that you recognize something worth further consideration. That’s important, but it is not the same as understanding enough of what you have recognized to decide what you want to pursue.
You can know there is something worth exploring before you understand why the relationships within it matter. You can envision a creative expression of the idea without yet understanding why that particular expression matters.
Intuitive fit gives you enough reason to continue thinking through the possibility, and that recognition can give you conviction before you have developed enough understanding to make a creative decision. Before you can make that decision, you have to answer:
What exactly have I recognized?
Why You Started is Not Enough to Decide What Should Exist
Brand stories often begin with a reason to exist, while founder stories frequently locate that reason in a personal problem that inspired someone to create something better.
The experience can explain why someone started thinking about what could be different. It does not necessarily explain what they eventually came to understand because of it.
There is a difference between:
- This happened to me.
- This allowed me to recognize something.
- This is what I think could exist because of what I recognized.
The same distinction applies inside an established company. The initial observation might come from consumer research, a technical discovery, or something changing in the category.
Those inputs can give your imagination material to work with, but the work is determining what they allowed you to understand beyond the circumstances that first made you notice them.
That understanding begins developing the basis for what you eventually decide to pursue.
Understand Why This Expression Makes Sense Within Your Creative Vision
A brand can describe a new philosophy, proprietary system, or larger mission that explains what the company believes. It still does not explain what allows those beliefs and the proposed product to make sense in relation to one another.
A relatively conventional founder story can accompany a highly developed product strategy whose relationships become apparent through the portfolio itself.
The amount of explanation does not determine how developed the thinking underneath it is. Your understanding of the idea develops as you understand what relationship the creative expression has to your larger creative vision and why that relationship matters.
If that relationship remains unclear, more narrative may only add information around thinking that has not been sufficiently developed. Understanding the relationship gives you a stronger basis for deciding whether this is the creative expression you intend to pursue.
A New Expression Proposes a Relationship with What Already Exists
Most product innovations enter established brand, consumer, and market dynamics. Which dynamics matter most will depend on the idea, but the creative expression has to be understood against the context in which it could exist.
This is why a product can make perfect categorical sense and still leave you wondering what it contributes. A product might extend an established behavior into a new benefit, create a different expression of something consumers already associate with the brand, or challenge an assumption within the category.
In each case, understanding the idea means understanding the relationship the creative expression is proposing within what already exists. Belonging is not necessarily contributing.
Understanding that distinction allows you to see not only what you want to create, but why this particular creative expression matters within the reality it would enter.
Understanding the Relationship Gives You a Basis to Decide
Reference points are not proof that a product will succeed. They give your imagination more reality to think against.
Observations can reveal behaviors, while brand or product benchmarks can demonstrate relationships that already exist in another context. None of those inputs independently tells you what the idea should be. The work is understanding what they mean together.
Dimensionalization expands the field of relevant consideration. Synthesis develops meaning across what has been considered.
As that understanding develops, you begin to recognize what matters about the current reality, what relationship your creative expression is proposing within it, and why that relationship matters.
When you understand enough of the relevant relationships, you have a basis for making the creative decision that this is what you intend to pursue.
That is different from proving the idea will work.
Developing an Idea Requires Knowing What is Essential
Sometimes the first thing imagination gives you is a creative expression of what you are envisioning.
Once that expression has been named, it is easy for it to become the definition of the idea. Conviction in that expression can make it feel more developed than the thinking underneath it actually is. Understanding why you imagined that particular expression can reveal the relationships that made it meaningful in the first place.
- What about the expression matters?
- What relationship are you responding to?
- What would remain true if this particular expression changed?
A constraint may eventually make the first expression impossible, but that does not necessarily invalidate the relationship you decided was worth pursuing.
Understanding what is essential gives your imagination a basis for considering other expressions when reality changes while preventing the first expression from prematurely defining what the idea could become.
The creative decision establishes what matters enough to pursue without determining every expression the idea can eventually take.
Structure Should Develop the Idea, Not Decide What the Idea Means
Organizations use briefs, concepts, and hypotheses to represent what is being proposed. Structure is a form of compression. The problem begins when that structure substitutes for the thinking required to determine what belongs inside it.
Someone can complete an innovation brief without understanding the relationship they are proposing, while someone with a more developed understanding of their idea may still struggle to represent that thinking within the same structure.
The first can appear more prepared because the information is easier to evaluate, even when the second has developed more of the thinking underneath the idea.
The brief is not the reasoning process. It is a representation of thinking that has already begun.
Structure becomes useful when it can represent the thinking that informed the creative decision without substituting for that reasoning.
Expertise Creates a Paradox of Recognition
Years of experience teach someone what usually works, what tends to fail, and which relationships deserve attention, making experts particularly good at recognizing possibilities others miss.
The same expertise can make an unfamiliar relationship harder to recognize. An idea that does not resemble how someone understands the current reality can appear incomplete before they understand the relationship being proposed.
What one person recognizes as a future possibility may not fit another person's understanding of what is possible within the current reality. This does not make expertise the problem. It means expertise influences what each person can recognize.
That matters when an idea enters the innovation process because each function encounters it through a different area of expertise. Once there is enough shared understanding of what is being proposed, those different perspectives can reason against the same idea.
The Idea Has to Be Developed Enough to Withstand Disagreement
You can understand the relationships behind the idea you are proposing and still have it rejected.
Someone may understand the relationship being proposed and still reject the idea based on organizational realities or priorities, while another person’s expertise may make that future relationship difficult for them to recognize at all. Better articulation cannot guarantee that another person will see what you see.
The purpose of developing the idea is not to eliminate disagreement. It’s to make meaningful disagreement possible.
Without enough shared understanding of what is actually being proposed, people can begin reasoning against their own reconstruction of the idea instead. At that point, the disagreement is no longer necessarily about the same idea.
The Idea Can Now Enter the Innovation Process
Making a creative decision does not mean you have determined everything the idea could become. It means you understand enough of the relevant relationships to say, “This is what I think, and this is what I mean by it,” and decide that this is what you intend to pursue.
The idea does not have to be validated at this point. It needs enough developed meaning for someone else to consider what you are proposing without having to invent that meaning for you.
That gives other people something to think against. The creative decision gives the innovation process something defined enough to work with without determining everything the idea can become.
From there, the question becomes what else the idea could become.
—by THE BUILD BRIEF