Biffing Bad Ideas

(MoneyWatch)  One unfortunate little memory that lingers from my years as an employee was when I spent a big chunk of time researching and developing an idea that totally bombed.

In normal circumstances I would have been upset. But in truth I considered my boss to be a total jerk and so reveled privately in the project's demise.

Clearly I'm a much nicer person these days, but can't speak for him.

The truth is, no amount of effort or positive thinking is going to transform a lousy idea. The question is though, how do you determine when to keep shoveling in the resources, versus when to call it a day and drag the idea into the trash?

The answer is, I feel, at the very core of small business and helps explain why it's such a damn fine way of working. It has to do with how we are uniquely placed to be fully in touch with our intuition, or gut feeling, and in a position to respond to it fully.

In a larger organisation, an individual's intuitive feeling invariably becomes suppressed (or at the very least diluted), because speaking up can result in criticisms of being wrong; not getting it; not being up to speed and so on.

Not so the life of an independent. Our intuition tells us if an idea stinks and we can act on this feeling without fear of redress. It may not tell us immediately and it may not tell us directly, but tell us it most certainly does.

If something doesn't feel quite right, it probably isn't.

I like to think of my intuition as a 'caution indicator' more than a decision-maker. I may not biff a new idea completely, it's more likely I'll quarantine it for a while and go back to it later.

Do some seemingly bad ideas make it to market? Of course they do, but the chances are intuition has stalled the idea long enough for it (or the world) to evolve favourably.

What are your experiences, do you listen to your intuition? Post a comment and let's hear it.